that the inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands; and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad.  What he taught was a total bouleversement of the methods of his age.  “It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to conduct affairs—­without feeling the trouble of them, to taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense injury with kindness.”

The argument went all against him.  Their majesties of Ts’in and Tsin and Ts’i and Ts’u were there with their drums and tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering past;—­who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal Library?  Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty diddlings and political cheateries—­(it is all beautifully modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao?  The argument was all against him; he hadn’t a leg to stand on.  There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion to fly out from it into the world of men.  Very well then; he, being one with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary Garden; would go, and leave—­

A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of Chinese life.  You could not tell it at the time; you never would have guessed it—­but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and tramplings, had had something—­some seed of divinity, thrown down into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three centuries or so, and then—­

There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it.  You will see that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast away as savoring too much of the Manchu. (But it was Laotse and Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the Banished Angel that it savored of really.) Well, it was this Blue Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pass to the Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of men;—­it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the fields of China;—­and the Dragon would come to seek it in his time.—­You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his ox.  I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.

For it really was the Blue Pearl:  and the Lord knew what it was to do in China in its day.  It fell down, you may say, from the clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world; and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pass; and kindle the Chinese