times more so when there was something he did not comprehend.  Yet that unknown something occasioning a conflict between his cunning and his ignorance, and the latter being the greater, always betrayed itself, for nothing looks so silly as a fool acting wisdom.  The prince repeated his question; the governor demanded why he asked—­the prince had not patience to spell the question over again on his fingers, but bawled it as loud as he could to no purpose.  The courtiers ran in, and catching up the prince’s words, and repeating them imperfectly, it soon flew all over Pekin, and thence into the provinces, and thence into Tartary, and thence to Muscovy, and so on, that the prince wanted to know who the princess was, whose name was the same as her father’s.  As the Chinese have not the blessing (for aught I know) of having family surnames as we have, and as what would be their christian-names, if they were so happy as to be christians, are quite different for men and women, the Chinese, who think that must be a rule all over the world because it is theirs, decided that there could not exist upon the square face of the earth a woman whose name was the same as her father’s.  They repeated this so often, and with so much deference and so much obstinacy, that the prince, totally forgetting the original oracle, believed that he wanted to know who the woman was who had the same name as her father.  However, remembring there was something in the question that he had taken for royal, he always said the king her father.  The prime minister consulted the red book or court-calendar, which was his oracle, and could find no such princess.  All the ministers at foreign courts were instructed to inform themselves if there was any such lady; but as it took up a great deal of time to put these instructions into cypher, the prince’s impatience could not wait for the couriers setting out, but he determined to go himself in search of the princess.  The old king, who, as is usual, had left the whole management of affairs to his son the moment he was fourteen, was charmed with the prince’s resolution of seeing the world, which he thought could be done in a few days, the facility of which makes so many monarchs never stir out of their own palaces till it is too late; and his majesty declared, that he should approve of his son’s choice, be the lady who she would, provided she answered to the divine designation of having the same name as her father.

The prince rode post to Canton, intending to embark there on board an English man of war.  With what infinite transport did he hear the evening before he was to embark, that a sailor knew the identic lady in question.  The prince scalded his mouth with the tea he was drinking, broke the old china cup it was in, and which the queen his mother had given him at his departure from Pekin, and which had been given to her great great great great grandmother queen Fi by Confucius himself, and ran down to the vessel and