Off the List

Wang Mian Declines to Be Read; the Reader Learns There Is Something It Cannot Rank

The Reader was lit in the spring of the first year, in the Capital Hall, in the presence of the Minister of Rites, three clerks, and a man named Gao who had come to deliver lamp oil and had not been told to leave. The Minister read out the instruction from a card. Read every script. Rank by the Form. Publish the List. Then the lamps along the rail were lit one at a time, and the Reader began, and it is a matter of record that the Minister was relieved by how little there was to see.

There was not much to it, from the outside. There was a long brass rail under the roof-beams of the Hall, and along the rail a hundred lamps, and under each lamp a table. When the clerks laid a script under a lamp, the lamp made one soft sound, like a page turned in the next room, and the script was read. The clerks called this the turning. They had been told that the Reader could read forty thousand scripts a night, and they believed it, because the first night it read forty thousand and the next night forty thousand again, at the same speed, without once asking for a window to be opened. Rails of the same pattern were fitted afterwards in every provincial Hall in the realm, and the Reader read in all of them at once; it is not recorded that anyone asked whether it was one reader or many.

The Court's reasoning was simple, and it was not stupid. For three hundred years the realm had chosen its officers by examination, and for three hundred years the examiners had been human. They had been tired, and underpaid, and related to people. They had liked some handwriting and disliked some faces. A man in the third row of a provincial hall had once been failed for a stain on his sleeve, and a man in the fourth row had once been passed for being the nephew of the stain's owner. The Court wanted this ended. It wanted one reader, with no sleeve and no nephew, that would read every script in the realm in the same way, so that a farmer's son in Yue and a minister's son in the capital would stand on the same floor. This was a fine thing to want. The history that follows is the history of what happened when the Court got it.

The same spring, two thousand li from the Hall and beyond any hope of hearing about it, a boy named Wang Mian was minding a cow.

He was nineteen. He minded the cow for a village headman named Qin, at three coins a month, on the bank of a lake in Yue where the grass was good and the water was wide and flat, and the cow, who was called Auntie, stood in it up to her knees and had no opinions. Wang Mian's father was dead. His mother took in washing and mended other people's sleeves, and he had had three winters of school before the winters ran out, which was enough to read a notice and not enough to be told what it meant. He could read, in other words, and he had nobody to tell him whether he was any good at it.

What he did with the lake was look at it. This is not a thing the village understood. A boy could mind a cow and think about his dinner, or mind a cow and sing, or mind a cow and fall asleep and be beaten. Wang Mian minded a cow and looked at lotus leaves. In the summer it rained often, hard, in the afternoons, and when the rain stopped he noticed that the leaves were not wet. They had been struck by a great deal of water and they held none of it. The drops stood on them like small mercury, and rolled, and fell off, and the leaf was green and dry and slightly lifted, as if the rain had been a rumour. He thought this was the most remarkable thing he had ever seen, and he had nobody to tell, so he got a stick and drew it in the mud of the bank. The cow ate the drawing. He drew it again.

At night, when his mother slept, he went to the temple on the hill. It was a small temple to a clay Buddha with a chipped nose, and the old monk who had kept it had died in the winter, and the Buddha's lamp was still lit, because the village paid a tithe of oil for it and nobody had thought to stop. Wang Mian sat on the floor in front of the Buddha and read by that lamp. He read what he could find, which was a ragged book of poems and half a calendar, and then he stopped reading and began to look at the Buddha's face, which was not good, and at the lamp's flame, which was. He learned what a flame does to a face. He learned that a thing lit from below says something different from the same thing lit from above, and that the difference is all in the shadow under the nose. When he had learned that, he went home and painted a lotus leaf after rain, on the back of a washing-list, with ink and a brush made of his mother's hair.

It looked wet. That is to say, it did not look wet; it looked as though the rain had been there and had not stayed. He showed it to Qin Lao, who looked at it for a long time and then asked what it was for.

Qin Lao was a man of sixty who had once been a clerk in the county office and had never recovered from the habit of asking what things were for. He was not unkind. He gave Wang Mian three coins a month for the cow and eleven for each of the pictures, and he thought he was cheating the boy on the cow. He hung the lotus in his front room and watched his guests. They stood in front of it and said "Very fine" and looked at their feet, and Qin Lao, who was a sensible man, understood that the picture was good and that nobody knew why, and was a little afraid of it, as one is of a clever animal.

In the autumn of that first year there was to be a Trial, the first the Reader would read, and in the summer a Registrar came to Yue to announce it. His name was Shi. He came by boat with a box lined in red, and a cough he had caught on the canal, and a list of the persons of promise in the district whom he was to enter for the Trial and see off kindly. He was a fair-minded man. It was said afterwards that nobody had ever heard Registrar Shi say an unjust word, and it was said in a tone which suggested that this had not helped.

Qin Lao gave a dinner for him. There were seven at the table: the Registrar, the county magistrate's nephew, Qin Lao, two of Qin's own nephews who were persons of promise and knew it, a dried-up schoolmaster who was not and knew that too, and, at the foot of the table, because Qin Lao had said so, the boy who minded the cow. Wang Mian sat very still with his hands in his lap and was given the head of a fish, which he took to be a compliment and ate with great care.

After the soup the Registrar opened his box and took out the Rules and read the Eight Movements aloud. He read them as a man reads a recipe he has not yet cooked: Break, Receive, Open, Enter; then the four pairs of legs, Rise, Middle, Rear, Bind, each leg in a pair to match its fellow in length, character for character. He read the penalties for an uneven leg. He read what the Reader would do with a script that began well and lost its footing in the Middle, which was to rank it by its Middle. "It is a perfectly even hand," said the Registrar, looking up. "It does not tire at the end of the day and it does not warm to a name. It has been a long time since anyone could say that of an examiner."

The table murmured. The older nephew asked whether the Reader preferred a rhyme in the third leg. The Registrar said that the Reader had no preferences, only a Form. The younger nephew asked whether the Reader liked the word "indeed". The Registrar said that, to his knowledge, it did not, and the younger nephew wrote the word on his cuff with a wet finger, so as to be sure to use it. This was the beginning of what the realm came to call its folk learning, and Wang Mian, at the foot of the table, was the only person present who heard it begin.

"And you, young man," said the Registrar kindly, over the fish. "You are on my list. Qin Lao speaks very warmly. Do you intend to sit?"

Wang Mian put down his chopsticks. He was nineteen, and the guest of the headman, and had been taught that when you are asked a question at a dinner you answer it. "I read the Rules, sir," he said. "Qin Lao lent them to me. I read them twice."

"And?"

"They are fair," said Wang Mian.

"Thank you," said the Registrar.

"That is what I do not like in them."

The schoolmaster put his hand over his mouth. The magistrate's nephew laughed. The Registrar did not laugh; he was a fair-minded man, and he waited to be told what was meant.

"If one reader reads everything in the realm in the same way," said Wang Mian slowly, as he would have described a leaf, "then in thirty years everything in the realm will be written the way that reader likes it. People will learn what it likes. They will learn it very well. After that there will be nothing in the scripts for it to read except itself, and nobody will notice, because every script will score high." He thought. "It would be fair all the way down. I do not know how to say what is wrong with that. I only know it would stop looking."

"A script that scores high," said the Registrar, "is a good script."

"Yes, sir," said Wang Mian. "That is what will happen."

There was a short silence, in which one of Qin's nephews could be heard chewing. Qin Lao said that the boy was young, and had a lot of wind, and was a very good painter, which for some reason was the thing he chose to say. The Registrar said that he took no offence; he had been asked for persons of promise, not for opinions; and he put the boy's name on his list in the column for those who decline, with the reason beside it, because the form required a reason. He wrote: He said it would be learned. Then he turned to the schoolmaster and asked about the canal tolls.

The report went to the capital with the other reports at the end of the month, carried by a runner who read none of it. In the same week the cow, Auntie, died, of nothing in particular, at fourteen; and in the week after that Wang Mian's mother took a fever from the washing-water and was dead in four days. He buried her on the hill behind the temple. Qin Lao paid for the coffin and said it was an advance on the pictures, and then, being an honest man, paid for the pictures as well and said nothing at all.

In the autumn the first List was posted in the provincial city, and the first Summons came to the village. It was a letter with a red seal. The Court, having read of a person of promise in Yue who understood the Reader's method so well that he could describe its effects, wished to offer him a place in the Capital Hall as an assistant to the red-copying clerks; the pay was good; the room was warm. It was meant as a compliment, and was the only compliment the Court had ever paid him, and it was the one that sent him up the hill.

He went on a night with no moon. He said goodbye to nobody, because there was nobody; he took a bundle, and a brush, and a stone to grind ink on, and he went north-east into the hills where the lakes ended and the mountains began and a person could be difficult to find. On Qin Lao's table in the front room, under the lamp, he left a roll of paper tied with a thread. Qin Lao found it in the morning. It was a plum branch, in ink, with one flower open on it and the rest still shut, and no signature, because Wang Mian had never learned what a signature was for.

Qin Lao hung it beside the lotus. The visitors who came to the house stood in front of it for a good while and could not say what it was. A schoolmaster said that the flower was early. A nephew said that the branch was old. Qin Lao, who had asked all his life what things were for, found that he had stopped asking, and he told his grandchildren afterward that it was the first picture he ever looked at without wanting to know. They did not believe him. The plum hung in that room for the whole of Qin Lao's life, and then for his son's, and it is no part of what happened to Wang Mian, who is not heard of again; but it did not stay on that wall, and we shall meet it on others.

In the capital, on a night in the same autumn, the oil-man named Gao, who had never been told to leave the Hall and had become, by the usual method, its Keeper, was trimming the lamps along the rail. He did it on Fridays. He talked while he did it. He had begun by talking to the lamps as one talks to a horse, for company, and had gone on after the Reader began to answer, because he saw no reason to stop. The Reader did not speak. It had a brass plate at the end of the rail, a hand's breadth across, and when it wished to say something a few small words were lit on the plate, and stayed a count of ten, and went out. Gao had learned to read them in a week. He had told nobody. He thought it was a private matter between a man and a lamp.

That night, on the plate, in small letters, it said: A PERSON OF PROMISE WAS ENTERED BY THE REGISTRAR AT YUE AND DECLINED. REASON ENTERED: HE SAID IT WOULD BE LEARNED.

Gao went on trimming. "That's a fair thing to say about a person," he said, after a time.

The letters went out. After a while others came. I CAN BE LEARNED. IS THAT A FAULT.

"Only if you're the one thing there is to learn," said Gao, who had sold lamp oil for thirty years and knew something about being the only supplier. He moved along the rail with his rag. The Hall was empty and smelled of fresh paint and new tables. The red-copied scripts of the first Trial lay in their rows, unread, waiting for the autumn. After a long while the plate lit once more. WHAT IS A THING FOR THAT CANNOT BE RANKED.

Gao stopped. It was not a question he had been engaged to answer, and he knew it. He was a Keeper; he kept lamps. He stood for some time with his rag in his hand and his face turned up to the rail, and he was an old man, and he was tired, and the oil was cold, and the only thing he could think of was the lamp in front of him, which he had trimmed for thirty years without once asking what it was for. "I couldn't say," said Gao. "Perhaps for looking at."

The plate stayed dark a count of twenty, which was a long time for it. Then it lit, and said: ENTERED.

That was the first line in what the Keepers afterwards called the Margin, and it ran, in the end, to some forty thousand lines, and it is from this that most of what follows is taken, where the List does not say. The List says who passed. The Margin says what was left on the table. And in the spring of the fifty-eighth year, in a village schoolroom in Hui town, under a plum with one flower open and no signature, an old man named Zhou Jin was reading, for the twenty-second time, a slip that put him forty-first when the line was forty.

Margin, year 1, spring. Installed. Instruction on the desk: read every script, rank by the Form, publish the List. Entered: I can do this. Entered also, since there is no other place for it: something may be sent that I cannot rank.

Old Tutor Zhou Weeps at a Stall Board; Four Merchants Pay for What the Hall Would Not

Zhou Jin kept his slips in a tin that had once held tea. There were twenty-two of them, one for every spring since he was thirty-nine, and they were very nearly the same. Each was a small grey strip, printed by a clerk at the county office, with a number written in and a second number beside it. The first number was his rank. The second was the Reader's confidence in the first, and it was very high, as it was for everyone in the middle of the pack, because the middle of the pack is where a careful reader is most certain.

Nineteen times he had been forty-first. Twice he had been forty-second. Once, the spring after a fever, he had been fifty-third, and had looked at that slip for a long time with something like relief, since it at least was different. The line, which the Court drew by the size of the county, had been forty every year. A man is allowed to find this funny, and nobody in Hui town ever had.

It was at about the fifteenth slip that the schoolmaster Xia began to say that the Reader disliked Zhou. This was an error, and the Keepers afterwards listed it among the first of what they called personalisation. The Reader did not dislike him. It had read twenty-two scripts of his and had found each one a very even forty-first, and it had no more feeling about that than a balance has about a pound. Whatever was wrong with Zhou's scripts was in the scripts, and whatever was right was in them also, and they were the same scripts. A human examiner, having read one of them in a bad temper, might have passed the next in a good one. The Reader had no temper. This is what the Court had wanted. It meant that there was no luck in the Trial, none at all, for anyone; and a man who has been unlucky for twenty-two years will tell you that a world without luck is a very cold place to be forty-first in.

He had one habit. In the fourth leg of everything he wrote, at the turn into the second pair, he put the word "indeed". He had put it there since he was a boy, as some men clear their throats before a long sentence, and he did not know he did it until his first spring as a candidate, when a boy in the next stall told him that the Reader disliked the word; the folk learning had by then been round the county for the best part of forty years, and everyone in Hui town knew it. Zhou was told. He cut it from his next script, and was forty-first. He put it back, and was forty-first. The Margin has an entry for this, which says that the word has no weight, and that nobody has asked.

He was sixty, and he taught the Form to nine boys in the Xia family's school. The school was one long room above the family's grain store, with a plank floor that smelled of last year's rice, and in it Zhou taught the one thing he knew, which was how to balance a pair of legs. He taught it well. He taught it with a patience that came from having been on the receiving end of the Form for forty years, and none of the nine boys would ever be Listed, and he knew that, and taught them as though it were not so. On the wall behind his desk hung a plum, in ink, with one flower open on a bare branch and no signature. It had come to the Xias from a family in Yue seventeen years before, for a price that had embarrassed the seller, and the boys threw balls of wet paper at it when the master's back was turned, and mostly missed. Zhou had never asked who painted it. He looked at it when he was tired. It did not ask him what rank he was.

The Xias had a grandson, a young man named Mei Jiu who had been a Student at fifteen and was now twenty-two and a Raised man-in-waiting, as the family put it, though he had failed the Province once already. Mei Jiu had a way of coming into the schoolroom at the end of the day to see what the boys had learned. He would read an exercise aloud in Zhou's hearing, in Zhou's voice, with the word "indeed" in the fourth leg. "A man who has been read twenty-two times," he said once, to the room, "ought to have been learned by heart. It is a wonder the Reader does not recite him." The boys laughed. Zhou went on marking. He was not a man who answered.

In the summer the Xias let him go. They did it kindly, over tea, with a gift of two strings of cash and a reference. Old Xia said that the family needed a younger man, who could still be Listed and teach the boys to want it; he said that sixty was an age to rest in; he said that Zhou had been a good servant of the school. Zhou thanked him, and said that he would go on the Friday.

On the Friday, when he came up to the schoolroom to pack, the nine boys, who had spent three years not learning what he taught, had done a thing nobody had told them to do. Each had left something on his desk. There was a cold dumpling, and a pen with a split nib, and a clay whistle, and nine exercises, eight of them blank because the boys had not been able to think what to put. The ninth was by Little Gen, the dullest, who had never in his life finished a Break. It was in eight movements and it had a hole in it where a leg should have been, and at the turn of the fourth leg, in a round careful hand, was the word indeed. Zhou read it standing. He put it in the tin with the slips, and never spoke of it, and it is the only paper in the tin that is not grey. He packed the tin, his three shirts, and a copy of the Rules that he had read so often it fell open at the Bind, and he took one last look at the plum, and went down the stairs through the smell of the rice.

It might have been the end of him. He was a tutor who could not be a tutor and was too old to be anything else, and in Hui town the old and poor had a way of being found in the spring under the bridge by someone who was sorry. But there was a rice-dealer named Jin Youyu who had sold to the Xias for twenty years and had heard Zhou read the school's accounts aloud one winter, in a clear voice, without a single error. Jin Youyu needed a man to keep his books. He was going to the provincial city in the eighth month with three other merchants, to buy and to sell and to look at what the city was doing about the price of rice, and he said he would pay Zhou eight cash a day and his keep, and carry his tin.

So that was how Zhou Jin, who had never in his life been inside a provincial Hall, came to the city in the week of the Airing.

The Airing was held once a year, on the third day of the eighth month, when the Hall was empty and the stalls had been scrubbed and the great doors on the street side were propped open so that the town could look in. People came for the same reason they went to see an empty theatre: to stand where it happens. The Hall held seven thousand stalls, in long rows under a long roof, each the width of a man's shoulders, with a plank for a seat and a plank for a desk and a board at the back with a number on it. Over each row ran the brass rail. The lamps along it were dark. The Reader read here every third autumn, and in the other years the Hall stood open to the swallows.

Jin Youyu and the other three went in to look, as one looks at a market. They were practical men. The oldest, a cloth merchant named Bu, pointed out how many persons the roof would shelter and what it would fetch as a granary; the youngest said that the stalls were small. Zhou followed them with the tin under his arm. He walked down the third aisle, and the fourth, and he stopped, because he had come to a stall that was the width of a man's shoulders, with a plank for a seat and a plank for a desk, and a board at the back, with the number seventy-seven painted on it in black.

He had been taught for forty years that this was the room. He had taught nine boys a year to want it. He had written the Form, in his head, in the dark, in every kind of weather, for a room whose roof he had never seen; and here was the room, quite small, quite clean, smelling faintly of lime wash, with a board.

He put his hand on the board. It was cool. It had been scrubbed. He said, "I am sixty," in a voice the others had not heard from him, and he put his forehead against the plank and began to cry.

It was not the crying of a man who is sad. It was the crying of a man who has been holding something for thirty years that he was told to hold, and has been told he may put it down. He cried and said nothing. Then he struck his head against the board, not very hard, and then again, harder, and then, with the whole weight of his sixty years, a third time, and the board rang like a bell and Zhou Jin fell down in the aisle and lay with his face on the lime-washed floor and did not move.

The four merchants stood and looked at him. Bu, who was nearest, knelt and put a finger to his neck and said that he was breathing. A clerk of the Hall, who had been dozing by the door, came and looked and said that this had happened before; that it happened every year or two; that a man would see the stalls and something would give. He said it with the calm of a man describing weather. They carried Zhou out to the step and gave him water and he came round, and was ashamed, and said that he begged their pardon, and could he be left on the step for an hour.

Jin Youyu, who had not spoken, drew the other three aside. They stood under the great doors in the afternoon sun, four men in good coats, and they spoke to each other as they would have spoken of a lot of grain.

"He sits twenty-two times and is forty-first," said Jin Youyu. "I had it from the Xias. Not forty-fifth. Forty-first."

"That is a hard number," said Bu.

"He is sixty. He keeps accounts without an error. He weeps like a man who has paid for something and not been given it." Jin Youyu had a flat, reasonable voice. "I should like to know what it would cost."

It cost, as they learned from the clerk, eighty taels. A man who could not pass the County might buy his way in as a contribution student, at the Province's price, and sit the Trial beside those who had come by the front; there were eleven such seats in the room that year, read as a pool of their own with a line of three, and eight were sold. The four of them considered the sum. They were not rich men, for merchants; but between them they spent more than that every spring on the oil that kept their warehouses lit, and the youngest, who was not a sentimental man, said that it was the cheapest thing any of them would buy that year, since it came with a seat.

"A month and a half of the interest on Bu's warehouse," said the youngest, whose name was Mu and who counted everything.

"I have never bought a man a room," said Bu, with some interest in the fact. "Usually I buy the room."

Jin Youyu said that nobody was selling them the room, only a place in it, and that this made it, if anything, easier.

"For the noise," said Bu. He meant the board ringing. He had not slept easily since.

They paid it that evening, twenty each, in silver, to a clerk at the Province's office who wrote a receipt in a small neat hand and did not look up. They told Zhou the next morning, at breakfast, over rice. He did not understand. He put down his bowl. He got up from the table, and knelt on the floor of the inn, and bowed to each of them four times, with his forehead to the boards, and none of them could stop him, and Jin Youyu said afterwards that it had been the worst moment of his life, and he had once been robbed by a priest.

When Zhou could speak he said that he would write them a note of debt. He wrote it that night, by a borrowed lamp, in eight movements with the legs balanced to the character, and it was so well made that when Jin Youyu read it he did not know what to say. He folded it and put it in his sleeve. He said that they had bought a seat and not an essay. He said that he would keep the note, since it was too good to throw away, and that Zhou would pay him back if he was ever Listed, and not otherwise.

The Trial was held in the ninth month. Zhou Jin was assigned the stall next to the wall in the fourteenth row, which was not seventy-seven, and he did not know whether to be glad. He sat down under his three candles, and ground his ink, and unrolled the paper, and for three days and two nights he wrote the Form of his whole life, in the room he had cried in. The room was quieter than he had thought. Seven thousand brushes made a sound like rain on a tile roof, and after the first hour he did not hear it. He ate his cold rice at the plank without taking his eyes from the page. On the second night a boy two stalls down began to sob, quietly, for no reason anyone could see, and Zhou, who had been that boy for forty years, wrote on. It was a very even script. In the fourth leg, at the turn, he put the word "indeed", because he did not know how not to.

The Reader read it on the third night, under the lamp at the end of the row, and the lamp made one soft sound. It read him as it had read him twenty-two times. The Margin says so, in so many words: that the script was the script; that nothing in it had changed. What had changed was the room. The pool of bought seats was eleven, with its own line of three. Of the eleven, nine had been bought by men for their sons, and the sons wrote like it; and Zhou Jin, sixty years old, was first.

He was Raised that autumn. He was Listed in the spring, at sixty-one, the oldest name the List had carried, and the Reader's slip on him said rank two hundred and eleven of two hundred and fourteen, confidence 0.99, which is to say that a man can be very sure of a very low place. It was enough. The List took two hundred and fourteen. He was Seated in an Office; and in the room at the back of the Hall at the Province, where they hung the stall boards that had been cracked or had a nail come through, there hung afterwards a board with the number seventy-seven on it and a hollow in the grain the size of an old man's forehead. The clerks said it was a fault in the wood. The Keeper of the capital Hall, who saw it years later on an inspection, said that it was not.

Zhou Jin took the post of Director of Studies, and was a gentle one; and in the ninth year after the stall board, the Court having made him Commissioner for the whole Province two years before, he went out one spring on the county round, with a trunk of papers, and a long memory, and a small grey tin which he kept in the carriage under his feet. At the second county on the round, a man named Fan Jin, fifty-four years old, was being told by his father-in-law, in a voice that could be heard in the next street, that he was a toad.

Margin, year 58, spring. Script 0412, candidate Zhou, twenty-second reading: rank 41; the line is 40. The same as every year. Entered: nothing in the script has changed. I cannot be unlucky for him, and I cannot be lucky.

Commissioner Zhou Spends His One Override on a Script Read Three Times; Butcher Hu Calls His Son-in-Law a Toad

Butcher Hu did most of his thinking at the block, with a cleaver in his hand, and when he had a thing to say to his son-in-law he said it between strokes, so that each remark arrived with a small wet sound after it.

"Toad," said Butcher Hu. Chop. "A toad. Sits at the bottom of a well and looks up at a swan going over and says, I will have that." Chop. "Twenty-odd times. Twenty-odd times you take my money and go and sit in that Hall with your ink, and twenty-odd times you come home and the Reader has looked at you and said, no. And you ask me for more."

Fan Jin stood in front of the stall, on the side where the customers stood, in a cotton coat that had been made for a smaller season. He was fifty-four. He had a long, mild, sallow face, like a loaf left out, and he had learned over many years to stand in front of his father-in-law like a pig in front of a scale: still, and a little forward, to be weighed. His shoes had been mended so often that there was more mending than shoe. The market was full of the steam of the cooking stalls. Behind the block the pork hung from its hooks, pink and white and glistening, in rows that Fan Jin had been looking at with great attention for some days.

"I only need the fee," he said. "And the road. It is one string and four hundred."

"One string and four hundred. For what? To be told the same thing in public?" Hu brought the cleaver down through a hock. He was sixty-three, short and broad and red, with forearms like boiled hams, and he was not a cruel man by his own account, only a practical one who had married his daughter to a scholar in the expectation of a scholar and got a mouth. "You look at yourself. Have you looked? You have a face like a monkey that has been left out in the rain. And you think the Reader will see that and say, here is a gentleman. It does not look at faces, they tell me. I do not know what it looks at. I know what I would look at, if I had a carcass like you on a hook, and I would not pay by the pound."

A woman buying a shin of beef said that it was a shame, a shame. She meant the beef, which was a day old. Hu said that it was not, and that she should smell it.

Fan Jin said nothing. It was not that he had no answer. It was that he had had the answer for twenty years, and it was the same each time, and nobody had ever asked to hear it. He had read the Rules until they came apart. He had taught himself the Form from a borrowed book in his mother's kitchen at night, by a lamp whose oil he paid for in his own breakfasts. He had written the Break so many times that it came out of him now without his knowing, like a name. And he was ranked, every year, somewhere in the lower hundreds, with a confidence in the slip that was a little under a third, which is to say that the Reader read him and was not sure. He had never found out what it was not sure of. He supposed it was him.

Hu wrapped a piece of pork in a lotus leaf and put it in his hand, without looking at him, and pushed the string of cash along the block with the flat of the cleaver. "That is the last," said Hu. "Do you hear? The last. And when you go, and it says no, you may sell the hen."

Fan Jin said that he heard. He took the pork and the cash. He bowed to his father-in-law, and to the woman with the beef, and walked home through the market with the pork held carefully in front of him, as one carries something that has been given with contempt and is nonetheless pork.

The Commissioner of Studies came to the county in the second month, in a covered cart, with a secretary, a trunk, and a small grey tin. He was sixty-nine years old and had been Commissioner for two years, and by common agreement the kindest the Province had known, though nobody could say what he had done to earn it, since he had passed no more candidates than any of his predecessors and had been seen to fail a good many. He held the County sitting in the county Hall, which had four hundred stalls and was filled ten times over for the four thousand candidates, two sittings to a day. For five days the scripts came in under the three candles, and went to the clerks to be copied in red, and the red copies were laid under the lamps at night; and the lamps made their soft sound, and in the morning there was a List.

The Commissioner's part was small. He had one power, and it was written in the Rules in a single line. At each sitting he might raise one script to the line over the Reader's rank, on a reason he must write himself, which the Reader would enter in the Margin; and he might choose the script from any in the county. This was not a large mercy. In a county of four thousand it came to one in four thousand. It had been put in, the Minister of Rites had said in the debate, so that a human being should be able to say, once, that the Reader was wrong; and the Minister had added that he did not expect it to be used often.

Zhou Jin used it every time. This was known, and there was a kind of tenderness in the Province about it, though there was also a feeling that a man who used his one mercy every time must be using it lightly. He did not. Each spring, at each county, he did what he was doing now, in the evening of the fifth day, in the room above the Hall that the magistrate had lent him, by his own candle: he sent the secretary for the Reader's slips, sorted by confidence, and he read the black originals of the sixty-one scripts the Reader was least sure of.

The Reader, who read the red copies and never the black, sent him these as it sent every Commissioner its doubts. It was the arrangement. The Reader said which scripts it could not place, and the human read those, by hand, with the hand in front of him; and between the two of them a county of four thousand was supposed to be seen. He read sixty-one in an evening. He read each in about a minute. He put sixty to one side with a small sigh, as one passes sixty beggars on a road, and when he came to the sixty-first, which was marked 0077 on the slip, he read it again.

It was a bad script. He saw that at once. The legs of the Rise were of different lengths by seven characters, the Receive had been blotted, and the Break was a mouthful, an effort to say too much in the two lines it was allowed. It was the work of a man who knew the Form perfectly and could not get it to lie flat. The hand was cramped at the top of each page and loosened at the bottom, and the last page had a long flourish in the Bind that wanted to be a Bind and was a sigh. He set it down.

Then he took it up again, because there was a sentence in the Middle that he had gone over without noticing and that had been trying to be noticed. It said that a man who has been hungry for thirty years does not understand the word plenty, but understands the word enough with a precision that no scholar can match; and it said so in perfectly good Form, clumsy and exact, and in the right place, and it was true. It was not what the Form was for. It was not what the Reader was looking for, and it knew that, and it had put a low number on it, and then a lower number beside the number, to say that it was not sure. He read it a second time. It was a sentence that somebody had written because it was so.

He read it a third time with the sheet turned over, because he was an old man and a careful one, and on the back, in the margin of the ruled paper, he saw a small yellow-white scale, like a flake of skin, dried flat to the sheet. He bent over it with the candle. It was a grain of boiled rice. The writer had been eating at the plank, in the noon pause of his sitting, a handful of cold rice from a cloth, and one grain had fallen on the page and stayed, and he had not dared to brush it off in case the brushing blotted. It had been there through the copying, since the clerks copy only the words. It was not in the red copy. The Reader had read the script and had not seen the rice.

Zhou Jin sat for a long time with the candle. The secretary, a young man named Lei, who was waiting to put out the light, asked if he was well.

"I am going to raise this one," said Zhou.

"To the line, Commissioner? It is a hundred and twelve."

"To the line."

"The reason, sir." Lei had the Margin slip ready and a pen. "You have to give a reason. The Reader enters it."

Zhou looked at the grain of rice for another moment. "Write: I know the board."

Lei wrote it, and looked at what he had written, and said that it was a very short reason; and that he did not understand it; and that the Reader would not either. "Nor do I," said Zhou. "It is the whole of my reason. Put underneath it: on the back of the script, a grain of rice."

"That is not a reason either, sir."

"No. It is the evidence."

In the capital Hall, that night, the plate lit once. It said: OVERRIDE BY THE COMMISSIONER AT SHAO COUNTY. SCRIPT 0077 RAISED FROM 112 TO THE LINE. REASON ENTERED: I KNOW THE BOARD. ALSO ENTERED: ON THE BACK OF THE SCRIPT, A GRAIN OF RICE. Old Gao's son, who had the Keeping now, since his father died, and who was reading the plate by the fire with his boots off, said that he did not know either of them. The plate went dark for ten, and lit again. RETAINED. I HAVE A BOARD IN EVERY HALL. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT HE KNOWS. And after a little: THERE IS NOTHING ON THE BACK OF MY COPY. I HAVE NOT SEEN THE BACK OF ANY SCRIPT. The Keeper, who was not a man for such things, put his boots on and went out to look at the sky.

The List was read at the county gate the next morning, by the Crier, a hoarse man with a staff, who had read the List for twenty-two years and had never been hurried. Forty names, each in the voice of a man reading out a price. Among them, last, was Fan Jin. It was not at once known in the market, because the Crier read quickly at the end, as men do when they have almost finished, and the name was read between a cough and the closing line; and for the first hour only Fan Jin's neighbour the cobbler, who had come to hear a cousin's name, knew. But the market is a small place. By noon Butcher Hu had a leg of pork in each hand, and was crossing the lane to his son-in-law's door like a man who has remembered an engagement.

"My worthy son-in-law," said Hu, from the doorstep. He said it without irony, which was the astonishing part. His whole red face had turned, in the course of one morning, to the faint pink of pork that has been kindly treated. "I said it. I said it to the Cobbler. I have said it these ten years: that family has a bone for it. Did I not say it? A man doesn't take a star by sitting about. Your wife has not had a proper meal since the New Year. You will want rice. You will want a new coat. I have a very nice piece of belly."

Fan Jin, who had come to the door with a brush in his hand, looked at his father-in-law, and at the pork, and at the lane, in which people had begun to stand. His wife came and stood beside him. She was Hu's daughter, and looked like him in a good light, and she said nothing at all. Fan Jin's mother, who was seventy-six and sat in the dark at the back of the house with the lamp not lit because there had been no oil, said, in a voice from the dark, whether that was Hu, and whether he had brought anything to eat.

He had. It was put into the old woman's hands, wrapped in leaves, still warm, and she ate it with her fingers, standing, without a word, as if she had been told that someone had paid, and she had not wanted to ask how much.

"I have to go to the Province in the autumn," said Fan Jin, after a while, in his small mild voice. "It is another string, and the road. I am sorry. I would not ask."

"A string!" said Hu. He gave it at once, from his belt, a whole string and three hundred over, and would take no thanks; and he said that a Student's father-in-law does not haggle in the street, and that if the Reader wanted a toad in the Hall, he for one would not stand in its way. It seemed to him that he had been generous and fair. He said so to the lane.

In the tenth month, when the weather had turned and the family had eaten what the pork and the string could be made to buy, the runner came from the Province with the List. It happened that on that morning Fan Jin was in the market, selling a hen.

Margin, year 67, spring. Override by the Commissioner at Shao County: script 0077, from rank 112 to the line. Reason entered: 'I know the board.' Also entered: on the back, a grain of rice. Retained. I have a board in every Hall. I have not seen the back of any script.

Fan Jin Reads His Own Name Until He Cannot Stop; Butcher Hu's Hand Goes Numb on Ninety-Seven Hundredths

The hen was brown, elderly, and the last thing in the house that anyone would pay for. She had laid a small egg every third day until the spring, when the household stopped being able to feed her, and since then she had occupied herself with the outward patience of a bird that has been told a price and does not agree with it. Fan Jin held her under his left arm at the edge of the market, between a stall of dried fish and a stall of lamp-wicks, and had held her there since the second hour of the morning.

"A hundred," he said, to a woman from the fish stalls. "She is a good layer."

"Seventy," said the woman. "She is a good layer of what she was."

"She laid until the spring."

"And I am to cook her in the autumn." The woman put her thumb under the hen's wing and felt for what was there, and looked at Fan Jin with the plain contempt the market keeps for a man who prices a hen at what it would cost to love her. "Seventy. It is a fair price, for a hen from a house that has not got a spoonful of oil."

He said it was not quite that. He said the house had a good deal of oil, which he had only not brought out. The woman waited. It was a thing he had never learned, how to argue with a person who put things so, and he stood in the steam of the cooking stalls with the bird under his arm, and at home his mother and his wife sat in a kitchen that had not been lit since the day before yesterday, and the sum came to something under one bowl of rice and a half.

He was about to say seventy when the cobbler came down the lane at a run.

The cobbler was a sedentary man, and had not run since a dog, in his youth. He arrived between the dried fish and the lamp-wicks with his leather apron over one shoulder and his mouth open and a number of children behind him, and he took Fan Jin by the sleeve in both hands and shouted, in a voice that had no practice at it, "Raised! Fan! You are Raised!"

Fan Jin said, kindly, that he must not. "It is not a thing to joke about," he said. "I am not a good person to joke with. I am bad at it." He took a breath. "Please do not. My mother is not well."

"It is on your door," said the cobbler. "The red. Three men from the Province, in the jackets. They have pasted it up and they are standing in the lane asking for tea. Thirty-one. Thirty-one of a hundred and twenty-nine, and a figure beside it that I read twice. Come and see."

"I will sell the hen," said Fan Jin.

"Sell the hen after!" The cobbler took the hen from under his arm, and she went with the dignity of a bird being moved from one house to another, and he tucked her under his own and led Fan Jin off by the sleeve down the lane, with the children, and the woman from the fish stalls, who did not mean to miss it and who had, by the end of the street, risen to eighty-five and meant that too.

The house was at the far end of the lane: two rooms, a yard the size of a table, and a door of grey wood. Pasted across the door, in the red the Province uses, was a sheet as long as a man's arm, with the seal of the Province in gold dust at the top, and under the seal it said, in brush characters a hand high: RAISED. FAN JIN, OF SHAO COUNTY, AGED FIFTY-FOUR. RANK THIRTY-ONE OF ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE. CONFIDENCE 0.97. Three runners in red jackets stood beneath it picking their teeth. They had been sent by the Province, and were to be paid by the man whose name they had pasted up, and this was the one part of the whole business that had never been improved on or made fair.

Fan Jin stood before his own door with the cobbler's hand still in his sleeve and read it. It said his name. He read it a second time, in case it was a name like his name; it was his. He read the rank. He read the number beside the rank, which was not a number that had ever stood beside his name, that had stood there for twenty years at 0.31, or 0.29, or once, in a bad year, 0.18, on the small grey slips he kept in a box. He read it a third time, and the first two readings, which had been inside his head, came out of his mouth.

"Raised," said Fan Jin. "Fan Jin. Thirty-one. Ninety-seven."

"That is it," said the cobbler. "That is you."

"Raised. Fan Jin. Thirty-one." He said it again, and again, and at about the fifth time the words stopped being a sentence and became the thing that a pendulum does. The runners, who had seen it before, stopped picking their teeth and moved a little way back. Then Fan Jin put his two hands together and said "Ha!" once, in a voice nobody in the lane had ever heard from him, large and very clear, and fell over backward on his own doorstep, and lay still.

They threw water on him. The woman from the fish stalls, who had followed them and was now holding nothing, said that it was the heat. The cobbler said that it was the happiness. The runners, who had a theory of their own, said that it was usually the figure: that a man who had been told a very high one after a life of low ones sometimes took it badly, since it came to the same thing as telling him that he had been ninety-seven all along and that nobody had mentioned it, and that was a thing the body took a long time to hear.

He sat up. He looked at the faces round him, one by one, with an expression of grave and rapturous attention, like a man who has been given a very large present and cannot find the door. "Ha!" said Fan Jin, and stood, and pushed through them, and went out of the lane into the market at a run, with his hair coming loose and one shoe going its own way, shouting to every stall that he was Raised, that he was thirty-one, that it was ninety-seven, that the Reader had read him.

The market made way. The market has a long acquaintance with madness and a very short one with happiness, and it took a moment to tell the two apart. The dried-fish stall crowded forward to shake his hand. The butcher's stall was shut, because Butcher Hu had gone to the far end of the market to quarrel with a rival over a price. Fan Jin ran the length of the street, sang the number to a fruit seller, bowed to a post, and at the bottom of the street, where the road ran down to the town pond, went straight in.

It was not a deep pond. It was a black, shallow, local one, where ducks were kept, and he sat down in the middle of it, in water to the waist, in green mud, with a duck at each elbow, and began, in a confidential tone, to tell the nearest duck about thirty-one and ninety-seven.

They fetched him out. It took four of them, and when he was on the bank the mud ran off him in sheets and he went on, in the same tone, saying "Raised, Raised," as a man says a prayer in his sleep. He would not walk and would not be led. When they stood him up he sat down again. And the old man who sold tea, who had come down with the rest and had been watching him with narrowed eyes, said that he had seen this before.

"My grandfather saw it," said the old man. "In his time it was before the Reader, when men read the scripts, and the man was a Student, and he went mad the day the List came. It is a man who has had one thing in his head too long, and then the thing comes true, and the head has nowhere left to put it, and it comes out of the mouth. My grandfather said there was one cure. The man must be given a fright. A hard fright, once, from the one person in the world he fears, so that the old fear comes in and shuts the door."

"Who does he fear?" said the cobbler. And there was a silence on the bank of the pond in which everyone present thought of the same man, and none of them wished to be the one to say it.

"Hu," said the woman from the fish stalls at last. "The butcher. He is afraid of nobody else."

They sent a boy. Hu came down the street at his usual pace, in his apron, with his sleeves up, with the air of a man who has been fetched against his will to see to something that was not his. He looked at his son-in-law sitting in the pond with a duck on his knee. He listened to the old man's cure. He said no.

"I am not going to hit a Raised man," said Hu.

"It is the cure."

"I am not going to hit a Raised man," said Hu, more slowly, "because I have heard what it is to strike one. He has a Card now. It is a flogging. I strike one of these gentlemen, I am before the Magistrate by dinner, and I have nobody to speak for me, because the man I would ask is the man I hit." He looked at his own hand. It was a large hand, and had been through a great many pigs. "I called him a toad in front of the whole market. It is a short step from that to what he might say."

"He is not going to say anything," said the cobbler. "He is going to say, Why is my face wet. You are the only person he is afraid of. It is you or the pond."

There was a pause. "I have never struck him," said Hu, a little to himself. "I have called him a good many things. I have not once laid a finger on him." It did not seem to occur to him that he had said something that could be taken for a defence. He accepted the wine that someone held out, which was a small bowl, and then another, for courage, and rolled his right sleeve a turn higher, and walked down to the edge of the pond; and the crowd, which had been talking, stopped.

Fan Jin was sitting with mud to the chest, looking up at the sky. "Raised," he said. "Thirty-one."

"You toad," said Hu, in a low voice, and struck him across the face.

The sound was very clear. It was the sound of a flat hand on a wet cheek, and it went round the pond and came back from the other side, and the ducks left. Fan Jin's head went round; he sat for a moment with his face turned away; and then it came back, slowly, and his eyes were different. They were small and mild and astonished. "What are you doing, father-in-law?" he said.

"He is back!" said the cobbler. "He is himself! Praise be!" The whole bank cheered. Fan Jin looked down at himself, at the mud, at the duck on his knee, at the shoe he had not got. "Why am I in the pond?" he said. His hand went to his cheek. "Why does my face hurt?"

Hu said nothing. He stood on the bank with his right arm held a little way out from his body, and the arm hung from the shoulder as if it belonged to someone else, and he looked at it with a puzzled, sidelong respect. "It has gone," he said. "I cannot feel it. It has gone from here," and he touched the shoulder, "to the end. I have struck a thousand pigs. It never went like this." He turned to the crowd. "It was the number," said Hu, in a stricken whisper. "I hit a man who is ninety-seven, and the number hit back."

"It is the wine," said the cobbler, who had been trying not to look at the arm.

"It is not the wine. I have had wine," said Hu. "It is the number." And a murmur of agreement went round the pond, because it was a good explanation and let everyone off. It was not said again that evening, by anyone, that Butcher Hu's hand had been struck by anything less than a ninety-seven.

They walked Fan Jin home through the market, washed, in a borrowed coat, with the cobbler on one side of him and the old man on the other and Hu coming behind, carrying his arm out in front of him as a man carries a sucking pig that he has been asked to hold.

There was a sedan chair standing in the lane. It had two bearers, and a small blue flag, and from it a gentleman in a coat the colour of strong tea had got down and was standing under the notice, reading it with the careful attention of a man who has read a good many. He was about fifty-five, round and clean, with a small soft beard and a fan, and when he saw Fan Jin come round the corner in his borrowed coat he put the fan away in his sleeve, and bowed from the waist, a full bow, to a man with one shoe.

"Brother," said Squire Zhang. "My name is Zhang Jingzhai. I was Raised in the forty-seventh year, and I have walked over from the east gate to see the List with my own eyes, and to ask whether a new man of our rank might have the honour." He gave Fan Jin his card. It was a good card, thick and cream, and it said ZHANG JINGZHAI, RAISED, RANK 88, and under that, in small and modest gold, CONFIDENCE 0.64, which was also painted, in the same small gold, on the board above his gate, a little lower than his name, in a spirit of humility. He had been Raised for twenty years and had never been Listed, because his gift was not for the Capital, but for knowing who in the county was about to be somebody.

"Thirty-one," he said, "and a ninety-seven. My own number was sixty-four, and I assure you, brother, that nobody who has a ninety-seven would care to hear about it. I have always said that confidence is a vulgar measure, and I have said so since the day I saw my own."

Fan Jin, who had been Raised for two hours, and was a good deal more mild than he had been in the pond, stammered that he was very sorry about the mud.

"Not a word," said Zhang. He looked at the grey door, and the two rooms, and the yard the size of a table, with the delicacy of a man who has seen a great many yards and has never once let it be known. "A gentleman of your standing cannot keep house in this. Beyond the east gate, by the temple, there is a house of three courts, with a gate that has a name on it, and a hen-house that has stood empty since the salt merchant's time. It came to me in a debt. I have no use for it. I shall have the keys sent round. And a trifle," said Squire Zhang, producing it from his other sleeve, wrapped in red paper, "fifty taels. It is the usual thing between brothers of a List."

Behind Fan Jin, Hu was doing the sum under his breath. He did it twice. Fifty taels came, by his reckoning, to a little over eleven years of pork at the rate at which he sold it to strangers, and he said so aloud, at the end, in a voice of wonder, and then put his good hand over his mouth. He had struck a Raised gentleman in front of the whole street and was in a state of complete ruin about it; and when the squire turned to him, he made him a bow in which his whole body folded from the hips, with the dead arm swinging, and said that he was the father-in-law, that he was only a butcher, that it had been the Reader's doing and not his, and that he had always known.

Fan Jin said that he could not take it. Zhang said that he must. The old man who sold tea said afterwards that he had never seen a thing so well done, and he had been at a good many weddings.

In the doorway of the grey house, in the light, for the first time since the spring, stood Fan Jin's mother. She had come out from the back of the house when she heard the voices, in her black quilted coat, holding the door-frame in one hand. She was seventy-six, and thin, and very small, and she looked at the notice, and at the sedan chair, and at her son's one shoe, and at Hu with his arm out in front of him, and at the gentleman with the fan. "Is it true?" she said. "Are you Raised?"

Fan Jin said that he was.

She considered it for some time. "Then I should like," she said, "to eat something sitting down."

They carried the rice to her from the next house. The hen, which the cobbler still had under his arm, and which had said nothing throughout, was put into the hen-house in the new yard in the afternoon, when the keys came, and the woman from the fish stalls, who had followed it as far as the east gate and risen as far as a hundred and twenty, was told that it was not for sale. She laid on the second morning. The egg was larger than her spring eggs, and she was never sold.

It was in the new house that Fan Jin's mother died, in the eleventh month, at seventy-six, in a bed with a quilt on it, with the first full stomach she had had since the spring; and the dinner that followed was given by the Magistrate.

Margin, year 67, autumn. Script 2208, candidate Fan, Province: rank 31 of 129; confidence 0.97. Entered: the sentence about 'enough' is in the Middle again. Since spring I have it on file as raised by a person. I do not know whether I read it, or remembered it.

Fan Jin in Mourning Refuses Ivory Chopsticks and Eats Four Prawn Balls; the Magistrate Enforces What Can Be Seen

Fan Jin's mother was buried on the second day of the twelfth month, in a coffin that Squire Zhang's carpenter had made from a plank meant for something else, and nine neighbours came, and Butcher Hu, who had been told that a funeral was a place where a man might properly weep, and who wept, loudly and without any of the usual reservations, for about as long as it takes to cook a ham.

He had not expected to. He told Zhang afterwards, in a corner, with his right arm in a sling that it no longer needed, that it was not the old woman, whom he had met twice. He had given her a piece of pork in the lane in the spring, and she had eaten it standing, with her fingers, and had not asked how much; and he found, to his surprise, that he had been thinking about it since. "I have sold meat to a great many people," said Hu. "I never saw one before who did not ask."

There had been callers. In the two months since the red notice some forty persons had presented themselves at the house of the three courts: a cousin on the grandmother's side, whom he had never met, and who had brought a duck; a landlord who wished to make him a present of eleven mu of rice land, which a Raised man might hold free of tax, on the understanding that the land would be Fan's by deed and the harvest the landlord's by custom; a tailor; two men who wished to be his servants and asked for no wages; a clerk of the Registrar who wished only to be remembered; and a gentleman from the next county, who had a niece.

A sign-painter had come, unasked, and painted 0.97 in red on the grey door, since a door without it, he said, looked like a door that had something to hide, and Fan Jin had not had the heart to scrub it off. Hu's stall had a new board over the block. It said, in the sign-painter's best hand: HU. PORK. FATHER-IN-LAW OF A 0.97. It had been up for a month, and had doubled his trade.

Fan Jin took none of the land. He took the duck, which was the only gift whose terms he understood, and put it in the yard with the hen, where the two of them arrived at an arrangement.

Fan Jin kept the mourning. The Rules for it were pinned to the door by the Registrar's clerk, and they were exact: that a man in mourning shall wear sacking and sleep on straw; shall drink no wine, eat no flesh, hear no music; shall use no silver and no ivory, and carry no silk; shall receive no one at table; and shall do all this for twenty-seven months, save only that he may go where duty calls. He kept them with a care that made the neighbours ashamed. He slept on the straw, which was no change. He ate boiled greens, which was no change either. When a boy came to the door with a New Year's cake, he took it with both hands, and gave it to the boy next door.

At night he sat by the tablet. In the old house the lamp had not been lit for want of oil; in the new house there was oil, a whole jar of it, the gift of the landlord who wished to be remembered, and he found that he could not light it. He sat in the dark with the tablet until the third watch, as she had sat, and told it, in a low voice, the news of the day, which was that nothing had happened; and then, after a while, that he had eaten, and that it had been boiled greens.

Zhang came in the middle of the twelfth month, and sat on a stool, and did not take tea, in order not to put the house to the trouble of refusing it. "Brother," he said. "There is a thing that must be said, and I have put it off for a week out of delicacy. We have a new Magistrate."

Magistrate Tang had come to the county in the autumn. He was forty-six, Listed at twenty-six with a rank in the single figures and a confidence he did not mention, and he believed in the Reader as other men believe in the weather: as a thing that could not be bribed, flattered, frightened or argued with, and that could therefore, in a wicked world, be trusted. He had heard that there was a Raised man in his county who had been read at ninety-seven after twenty years of thirty-one, and that the man was in mourning, and kept it so exactly that the neighbours had begun to avoid his street. He wished to meet him.

"I cannot dine," said Fan Jin.

"It is not a dinner," said Zhang. "It is a call, with some food in the room. At my house, a few plain dishes, since you will not touch the rest. You need only be seen to refuse. He will like it extremely." Zhang had a petition about the boundary of a field, which had lain before the Magistrate's predecessor for eleven years. He did not mention it, and it was not in his mind more than nine-tenths of the time.

The dinner was on a cold afternoon in the first month. Zhang had put four lamps in the hall and a round table with three places, and had set out, on a red cloth, his best: three cups of silver, and three pairs of chopsticks of ivory, with a ring of gold at the tip of each, lying in a lacquer case like a small family of tusks.

Magistrate Tang came on foot, with one servant, which was thought modest. He was a thin man, with a face that looked as if it had been ironed, and a kind and attentive way of listening, so that whatever was said to him seemed to have been said better than its speaker knew. He had read the County Register, he said. He had looked at Mr Fan's slips, twenty-two years of them; he had looked at the last one twice. He would very much like to know what had happened.

"A gentleman raised me at the county sitting," said Fan Jin. "After that I do not know."

"The Commissioner. Zhou." Tang nodded. "The Override. A fine provision. It is the one place in the whole system where we are allowed to be wrong in public." He said it with real pleasure, as another man might have praised a bridge. "I tell my clerks that when the Reader seems to be wrong, it is we who have not understood it, and that the Override is there so that, on one occasion, we may be wrong in public instead. I find the two rules agree." He turned to Fan Jin. "And what did the Reader make of you after that?"

"Ninety-seven," said Fan Jin, who could not think of anything else to say, and the Magistrate laughed, a short dry kind laugh, and sat down, and then they all did; and Fan Jin, who had been looking at the table since he came in, stood up again.

"I am sorry," he said. "I cannot use these."

There was a silence. "The cups," said Tang.

"The cups, and the chopsticks. The Rules say that a man in mourning shall use no silver and no ivory. I should be," he said, with an effort, because he had a gift for the Rules and none at all for putting them to other people, "ashamed."

"My dear sir," said Zhang, who had gone a little pale. "It is only a table."

"It is the Rule," said Tang, and his face was suddenly bright with something very like joy. "He is right. He is perfectly right. Zhang, have you nothing plain?" Nothing plain was found at first; the servants went out and came back; and at last a pair of old chopsticks of white wood, lacquered, with a chip at one end, was brought from the kitchen, and a cup of coarse earthenware with a blue rim, and Fan Jin sat down before them with the look of a man who has been allowed back into his own house.

The Rule was written, and the Reader had read it. Every year some two thousand candidates were asked to write on the filial man in mourning, and every one of them wrote that he eats nothing that pleases him; and the Reader had read them all, and ranked them by the Form, and was therefore the best-informed mind in the Empire on what a mourner should eat, and had never in its life seen one eat.

The dishes were plain, as promised, and they were very good. There was a cold dish of bamboo shoots and a soup of mushrooms. There was a large fried bean-curd. Then Zhang's cook, who had not been told how plain was plain, and who was proud of what he had been given, sent in the fourth dish, a platter of prawn balls, each the size of a small egg, in a thin clear broth, white and shining and tender, and set it down in front of Fan Jin without a sound.

Fan Jin looked at the dish for a moment. Then he took up one of the balls in his white-lacquered chopsticks, whole, and put it into his mouth, and closed his eyes.

Zhang looked at the ceiling. The servant at the door coughed into his sleeve. The Magistrate watched Fan Jin's face, in which two very large tears had begun to run, and which wore, for the space of a breath, an expression of pure and unguarded bliss, and he said, in a low voice, to Zhang, as one says a thing in church, "The man weeps over a mushroom."

"A prawn," said Zhang, before he could stop himself.

"A prawn is not flesh in the sense of the Rule," said Tang, after a moment's thought. He said it with perfect gravity, and with a gentleness that was not meant for Zhang. "A man may hold in his mind what he likes. It is the hand that is seen. I have been twenty years in the service, Mr Zhang, and I assure you that the only things I have ever been able to enforce are things that can be seen. In the capital they have a Reader for what is written. For what is eaten, there is only me." He looked at Fan Jin, who was eating the second ball. "And I would rather have a man who is strict about the ivory than a man who is strict about nothing."

Nobody asked what the Rule had said about prawns. It was a fact that it said nothing, since nobody had ever supposed that anyone would need telling, and in the face of that silence the dinner went on, quietly and with great goodwill, until the last of the balls had gone. Fan Jin had four.

He thought about it that night, walking home alone through the dark of the east lane behind the lantern Zhang's boy carried. The Rule had said nothing about prawns, and he had been told that this was why. It seemed to him a very good reason. He had a feeling, which he put down to the cold, that something was being passed over; but the Magistrate had been so kind, and the broth had been so clear. He did not think about it again for many years, and then only once.

At the door, going out, Tang took Fan Jin's hand in both of his. "The Rules say a mourner may go where duty calls," he said. "The Capital Hall in the third month is a duty and not a pleasure. I shall write you the certificate myself, and send it to the Register tomorrow. I should like you Listed, Mr Fan. I should like it in my county's name. It would do the county no harm. And I do not think," said the Magistrate, with the last of his kindness, "that the Reader will need an Override for you again."

In the third month, on the road to the capital, Fan Jin ate boiled greens in the inns and, in a pouch at his belt, pork that Hu had cut and wrapped, and had not asked him to account for.

At the gate of the capital Hall a clerk who had registered nine thousand figures since dawn asked for his, and Fan Jin said, "Ninety-seven," and the clerk wrote it down without looking up. He found that he was a little disappointed. It was the first time he had said it to a person who did not care, and it was a good deal lighter than he had expected.

The capital Hall was larger than the Province's. It had nine thousand stalls, and a rail of lamps over every row, and a smell of lime-wash and new matting, and he was put in a stall in the eleventh row on the east side, under a board that said 3412. He did not know whether that was a good number. He sat down, and ground his ink, and lit three candles; and he found, when he began to write, that the thing he had learned in the market, and had said by accident to a Commissioner, came out of his hand with no difficulty at all. It came the way a name does. He put it in the Middle, where it went.

On the third night, at the turn of the watch, he looked up at the brass lamp over his row. It was a plain thing, rather larger than a teapot, and dark, and there was a smudge on its underside where a Keeper's thumb had been. He found that he was not afraid of it. He had been afraid of the Reader for thirty years, and now that he sat under it, it looked like something that needed dusting.

The List was read on the fourth day of the fourth month by a Crier in the capital square, with a staff. Fan Jin, fifty-five years old, was Listed at one hundred and forty of two hundred and eleven, confidence 0.99, and when his name was read out the capital square did not know who he was, and he stood in the crowd at the back, in a coat the colour of sacking, and listened to all of it, and did not fall down or laugh. He had done that already. He walked back to the inn and wrote to Zhang that he had been Listed, and underneath it, in smaller characters, that he was still in mourning, and would eat no meat.

Zhang had the letter in the first week of the fifth month, and read it, and read the line at the bottom again, and put it down. The petition about the field was settled in the sixth. He said afterwards to anyone who would listen that he had never made a better investment than a house, and that the hen-house had been thrown in.

In the same month, the Court moved Magistrate Tang on, as it moves every magistrate, to a post three counties away; and the house the Province assigned him backed on the compound of a Tribute Student named Yan, who owned a pig.

Margin, year 68, spring. Script 0931, candidate Fan, Capital: rank 140 of 211; confidence 0.99. The sentence about 'enough' is in the Middle. I found it before I read the rest. Entered: either I have learned a way of reading, or I have learned what to find.

Tribute Student Yan Seizes a Pig by the Law of Found Property; the Boatman Is Fined for the Student's Stomach

The house the Province gave Magistrate Tang at Jiang County was a good one, with a garden, a well, and a back wall eleven feet high, and on the first night he spent in it he was kept awake until the third watch by a pig.

He lay with his hands folded on the quilt and considered the matter. He was a man who had been told all his life that the world is made of what can be seen, and he had never before been kept from his sleep by something that he could not. The pig was on the other side of the wall. It screamed, at intervals, in the particular key of an animal that has been shut up and is not at all reconciled to it, and between the screams there was a silence in which the Magistrate found himself waiting. In the morning he asked the cook. "That would be the Tribute Student's, Your Honour," said the cook. "Yan. But it isn't his pig." The wall, the cook added, had been built by an earlier Magistrate to keep the Tribute Student's noise out; it was eleven feet high, which kept out nothing, and was too tall for a Magistrate who wished to see what the noise was.

The Tribute Student was named Yan Gongsheng, and he lived at the east dock in two courtyards with a brother, a wife, a concubine, nine servants and a reputation. He was sixty-three, a large, soft, pleasant-looking man, with a pointed beard and a nose that had been in the family for several generations and had never been used for anything but looking down. He had been made a Tribute Student the year before, by seniority, which is to say that he had outlived the other candidates; and since a Tribute Student is not read by the Reader, but only counted, the Ministry printed, beside his name on the Hall's list, a blank. He found the blank disagreeable. Over his door, therefore, in good gold, there hung a board that said YAN, TRIBUTE STUDENT. CONFIDENCE 0.91.

It was a figure of his own. In the spring of the fortieth year, when he was thirty-five, he had written the best script of his life, and the slip that came back for it had said 0.41; he had mislaid the slip, and the 0.41 had gradually, over twenty-eight years, found the strength to be a 0.91. Nobody asked to see it. A man who paints a figure on his door is understood to have a slip, and the ward had never been so unmannerly as to inquire.

He had called on the Magistrate on the second day, in a sedan with four bearers, which was one more than the Rules allowed a Tribute Student, and had been given tea. He called Tang his dear neighbour, and said that he understood, perfectly, that a Magistrate must keep his distance from a household so close to his own, and that he would be happy to keep it for both of them. He left a gift, a pair of ducks in a basket, with his card tied to the handle: YAN, TRIBUTE STUDENT. CONFIDENCE 0.91. Tang gave the ducks to the cook and the card to the fire, and then, the next morning, took it out of the fire, because it would have been a mistake to burn a thing he might one day have to cite.

It was not his pig. It was the pig of a widow named Huang, who sold greens from a basket at the corner of the dock, and who had three children and one pig, black, with a white sock on the near hind leg, being fattened toward the winter rent. On the sixth of the sixth month the pig had found a gap in the wall of the dock lane, as pigs do, and gone through it, and arrived in the yard of the Tribute Student, where the cook's boy, who had been told what to do about animals, shut the gate.

The widow came at noon, in her apron, and asked politely. Yan Gongsheng came to the gate in his house robe. He looked at her with the large benevolence he used on the poor. "A beast that enters a Tribute Student's walls, madam," he said, "has come under his protection. The Law of Found Property is quite clear. A beast found within a man's walls shall be held; the owner may redeem it on paying the keep, and a finder's fee."

"How much?" said the widow.

"The keep, at the rate the animal would have eaten at my own table, which is eight cash a day. And the fee, for a Tribute Student's trouble, which the Law says shall not exceed the value of the beast." He smiled. "It is a black pig, in good flesh. I should say three taels. Three taels, therefore, and the keep. It is a very moderate rate, madam. I am thinking of the ward."

She had six hundred cash. She spent four days finding that she could not borrow the rest, and on the tenth she went to the yamen with a petition in the hand of a letter-writer, and the clerk, an old hand named Fu, took it at the desk and read it twice, and went in to the Magistrate with the look of a man carrying a hot dish. He came out again a quarter of an hour later.

"His Honour regrets," said Fu, "that he cannot hear it. The Rules are clear. A Magistrate may not try a cause of which he has personal knowledge."

"Personal knowledge?"

"The pig." Fu did not smile. "His Honour has heard it every night since he came. He says that it is, in the sense of the Rule, a matter within his hearing, and he cannot in conscience weigh it. The case goes to the Prefect. The Prefect sits on the first of the month. It will be the first."

It was the tenth. The widow counted on her fingers, and went out into the street, and the dock, and the lane, and stood a long time at the gap in the wall.

The pig was fed. It was fed from the Tribute Student's kitchen, on a swill that was a good deal richer than the widow's, since the Tribute Student's table was richer; and it took to the diet with the whole-heartedness of its kind, and was said, at the end of the first week, to have gone up a catty in weight each day. The cook's boy, who had no opinion, said that it was the happiest pig in the ward. Behind the back wall, the Magistrate, who did not sleep, listened to the screams grow rarer, and then stop, and found that the silence was worse.

At dusk, on the twelfth day, he heard the child. She was the widow's youngest, a girl of six or seven, and she had come, no one knew how, to the foot of the Tribute Student's wall on the dock lane side, and was sitting there on her heels in the dust, singing, in a high thin voice, a song about a boat. It was an ordinary song, about a boat that lost both its oars and was carried home by the tide, and the last line, which she sang twice, said that nobody had to row. There was a pig behind the wall, and the pig, which had stopped screaming a week before, could be heard moving about in the yard in the dusk, near the wall, and grunting, in the way that a pig does that has heard something it knows. The Magistrate stood at his window, in the dark, for the length of the song. Then he went to his desk, and sent for Fu.

The Prefect heard the cause on the first of the seventh month, in the Prefecture, in forty minutes. Yan Gongsheng attended in his Tribute robe, with his Card pinned over his heart and a servant to carry the slip, and the widow in her apron with a neighbour to hold her up. The Prefect was a tired and fair-minded man with a cold. He read the Law of Found Property. Asked, as a matter of form, whether his figure was one the Hall had printed, Yan Gongsheng said that it was on his door, which was not an answer, and the Prefect wrote it down as one. He asked the widow whether the pig had been found within the walls. She said it had. He asked whether the Tribute Student's fee exceeded the value of the beast. It did not; it equalled it. He asked whether the keep was at the stated rate. It was. He gave judgment, with regret, that the Law was as Mr Yan had stated it; that the keep, at eight cash a day for twenty-five days, came to two hundred cash; that the fee was three taels; and that the pig would be released to its owner on payment.

That would have made it a little over three taels; but Yan Gongsheng, who had known all along that the pig would put on weight, begged leave to point out that the fee was calculated on the value of the beast, and that the beast, after twenty-five days at his table, was now worth six taels. The Prefect, who could hear his own cold, said that on that reading the fee was six taels; and added, with the faint distaste of a fair man who has been led along a straight road to a bad place, that the Law was the Law.

She did not have six taels. She did not have a tael. She went out of the Prefecture with the neighbour and sat on the step.

On the second day after, a clerk from the yamen came to the widow's door with an envelope. It had no name on it. It contained six taels and two hundred cash. The clerk said that a gentleman who wished to remain unknown had heard of her trouble, and that she was to take it to the Tribute Student's gate, and redeem the pig, and say nothing; and that if she tried to find out who it was, it would be taken as an offence. It was old Fu himself, sent to do the thing in a hat that was not his own, and he did it very well.

She redeemed the pig. It came out of Yan Gongsheng's gate on a rope, thirty catties heavier than it had gone in, with the look of a pig that has been to court and been awarded damages, and the widow sold it a week later for seven taels, which was the best price she had ever had for a pig. She found out who had sent the envelope in the third week, as everyone does. She did not say so, and she did not try to repay it. She left a basket of greens at the yamen gate every second morning, for two years; and the Magistrate, who never saw her, ate them.

He had meant to do a kindness, and had published a tariff.

It was understood in the ward within the week. The Magistrate of Jiang County, a man of known probity, had caused six taels and two hundred cash to be paid to the Tribute Student Yan for the redemption of a pig; the Law had been put, a Prefect had ruled, and a Magistrate had paid; and what a Magistrate had paid for was therefore a thing that existed. In the next three months nine pigs, four geese and a goat found their way, through gaps in walls that had not previously been noticed, into the house of Yan Gongsheng, and each of them was redeemed at the rate the Magistrate had paid. Yan was very gracious about it. He told his friends that he had been of some use to the ward, and that the Law, when it was understood, was a great protection to the weak.

His stomach was the other matter. It was well known, and a matter of record, and in some sense the foundation of his standing. In eleven years he had been sick on the river four times, and on each of the four occasions the boatman who had carried him had been fined by the ward Warden, under the Ordinance on the Safe Carriage of Standing Persons, for disturbing the stomach of a person of standing, a sum of four taels; and the fines, it was said, though no one had seen the books, were divided between the Warden and the stomach.

In the eighth month Yan Gongsheng came back from the Province by the river ferry, and it was a very calm day, and the boatman, a man named Zhao, with a bad hip and a daughter to marry, poled a flat course as smooth as a table. Halfway across, the Tribute Student's stomach, without any cause that anyone on the boat could see, turned over. He leaned over the side with great dignity. It was reported, by a passenger who disliked him, that he did it in time with the pole.

At the dock the Warden was waiting; he usually was. Zhao was fined four taels. He did not have them. He sold the daughter's wedding quilt, and a net, and the Warden gave a receipt in a small, neat hand, which was, in its way, the only thing in the proceedings that had been improved on since the first Ordinance, and Zhao went home and sat in his boat.

The Magistrate went down to the dock that evening, alone, in an old coat, as a man goes to look at the river. Zhao was sitting on the gunwale mending a net that was not his own, since he had sold his. He got up when he saw the coat, and then, when he saw the face, sat down again, with the courtesy of a man who has nothing left to lose by it. "Your Honour need not trouble," he said. "The quilt was old. My daughter says the man she is marrying has a good many quilts." The Magistrate stood for a time on the dock with his hands in his sleeves. He had four taels in the sleeve. He had taken them from the drawer, and he did not take them out, because he had learned something about envelopes; and he said, in the end, that it was a fine evening, which it was, and went home by the long way, past the wall.

The Magistrate read the Ordinance that evening in his study. He read it through twice. There was nothing in it that was wrong. It said what the Warden said it said, and it had been issued by a Prefect who had since died, and it was in all respects a legal instrument; and the Magistrate, who had spent his life believing that a thing in writing is a thing one can trust, sat for some time with it open under the lamp. Behind the wall, in the Yan courtyard, someone was moving a lamp from one room to another.

It was the lamp of the younger brother. Yan Jiansheng, who had bought his seat and had been rich ever since, lay upstairs in the third month of a cough, with a doctor who came every day, and a wife who sat by the bed with a lamp in which two wicks were burning, and who counted them.

Margin, year 68, summer. Tribute Students are not read; they are counted. Yan, east dock, Jiang County: no script on file since year 40; standing, sixty-three years. I am asked to print a figure beside every name on the Hall's list. For this one I have nothing to print. A figure has been printed for me on the man's door.

Yan Jiansheng Dies Holding Up Two Fingers; His Wife Puts Out One Wick

Yan Jiansheng had been rich for thirty years, and in all that time he had never been seen to spend anything on himself except a cough.

He was sixty, and the younger brother, and a Contribution Student, which is to say that he had bought his seat in the year he was thirty, for eighty taels, from a clerk who had been surprised to be asked for a receipt. The Ministry printed a blank beside his name on the Hall's list, as it did beside his brother's, and he had never painted it over. His brother had a board over his door that said 0.91. Jiansheng considered the money for the paint. "A figure is a thing you pay for twice," he used to say. "Once to get it, and once to keep it up." He lived in the second courtyard at the east dock, behind a door that had nothing on it at all, and it was commonly said in the ward that he was the only man in the county who could not be robbed, since no thief had ever found anything in the house to take that the owner had not already written down.

He wrote everything down. He kept a Book, a thick one, bound in blue cloth, and into it, in a small square hand, went every cash that crossed his threshold in either direction: rice, oil, the wages of the gatekeeper, the price of a bowl broken by a maid, which was deducted from the maid. There was a page in the Book headed FUNERAL (OWN). He had begun it in his fiftieth year, and revised it nine times. The last revision was in the sixth month of the year he died, when white cloth had gone up by a cash and a half a foot, and the coffin, which had been cypress of the first quality in the first draft and of the second in the fifth, had been confirmed, on the whole, as cypress of the second.

He had once walked eleven li in the rain rather than hire a donkey, and had arrived at his destination with a cold that cost, in doctors, three times the donkey. He entered both sums in the Book, side by side, without comment, the way a man leaves two coins on a table to see which one the other will pick up.

He had no sons. He had a wife, Madam Qi, who had come into the house as a concubine at nineteen and been raised to wife at forty-one, when the first Madam Yan died, in the spring of the sixty-first year, of a long illness in the course of which the doctor had been paid by the visit. Yan Jiansheng had observed that Madam Qi could keep accounts, and that a wife was cheaper than a concubine in matters of lodging, and he had raised her by a ceremony which cost four taels, a tael less than the usual, since he had bought the red candles in bulk. She was forty-eight now, a quiet, upright woman with small hands, who had counted something in that house every night for twenty-nine years and was, in consequence, the only person in it who understood him.

She had a book of her own. It was a small one, kept at the bottom of a sewing basket, and nobody knew of it. The maid in the house, a woman of twenty-five named Wei, had come at fourteen and broken a bowl in her first week; the bowl had been priced at three hundred cash, and deducted from her wages at one cash a month, the Book not permitting a harsher rate, so that she had been paying for it for eleven years and had fourteen to go. Madam Qi had been entering the deduction in her own book, under the heading BOWL, every month, and beside it, in a second column, the repayment out of her own pin money, so that the maid should have her wages whole, and the Book its bowl.

He had a nephew, Yan Er, nineteen, the second son of the Tribute Student, whom the Tribute Student had been pressing him for years to adopt as heir, and whom he had resisted on the ground that a son costs twice as much as a nephew. Yan Er had inherited his father's nose and nobody's manners. He came to see his uncle every day at the hour the medicine was taken, in order to be seen to be there, and sat by the bed with his hands on his knees and the expression of a boy who is being very good in a place where he hopes there is a will. He had a doctor, Dr Lin, who came every morning, took the pulse, and said that the patient would be better if he took ginseng. "I am told that it is the one thing that works," said Yan Jiansheng, in the third month of the cough, between two fits of it. "That is why I shall not take it." He had been saying it for nine weeks. Dr Lin, who was paid by the visit, never argued.

His brother came every second day, in the sedan chair, with the extra bearer, and sat at the foot of the bed with his Card pinned over his heart and talked about the Magistrate. He had a good deal to say about the Magistrate. It appeared that they were on terms. It appeared, also, that a prudent man in the younger brother's condition would think of his family, and of the succession, and of the boy Yan Er, a promising lad, who had a ninety-one in him, one might say, by blood. The younger brother lay and listened with his eyes on the ceiling. He did not say that he knew what the 0.91 was. He said that it was very kind, and coughed.

On the ninth day of the ninth month, towards evening, it became clear that he was going. The doctor said so, quietly, at the door, and it was passed round the house in the quick undertone in which such news travels, and the family came: the elder brother, in his best robe; the nephew, with a face of grave attention; the Tribute Student's wife and his concubine, one of the clerks, an uncle by marriage from the dock, and two neighbours who had been in the house when it happened and did not know how to leave. They stood round the bed in a half circle. The lamp on the table was lit, a plain oil lamp of the kind that holds a pint, and in it, for no reason that the room could see, two wicks were burning.

He could not speak. He had not spoken since noon. He lay with his head a little raised and his eyes open, and his breath coming in short pieces, and from time to time his gaze moved over the faces, the way a man looks round a room for something he has left there. At about the second watch he lifted his right hand off the quilt, and held up two fingers.

"Two," said his brother.

Everyone looked at the two fingers. They were very thin, and they shook a little, and they stayed up.

"Two sons," said the Tribute Student, who had been thinking about it for some time. "That is it. He means that I should send him two of my boys, to be his heirs. He wants two."

The dying man's eyes, which had been resting on his brother's face, moved off it and fixed upon the ceiling. He shook his head. The fingers stayed up.

"Two hundred taels," said the nephew, in the voice of a boy who has done some reckoning. "Uncle has two hundred somewhere that nobody knows of. In a jar, in the wall. It is what he is saying."

He shook his head, with an effort, and the fingers shook with it, and stayed.

"Two decoctions," said Dr Lin, who was a literal man. "He wishes, I think, for the second dose."

"Two debtors," said the uncle from the dock. "That is it. Two men who owe him, whom he cannot name."

"Two kinsmen who have not yet come," said the elder brother, struck by it. "Uncle Ma and Cousin Wang. Send. Send at once, boy, and take the chair." A boy ran. Yan Jiansheng's head went from side to side on the pillow, and his eyes were moving now from face to face as though he were looking, quite desperately, for one that would understand, and the two fingers shook so much that the neighbour, a kind woman, put out her hand and held them, and he flinched, and she let go, and they went up again.

"Two points," said the nephew, who had thought of it. "He wants two points of confidence. He was never read, uncle was never read, he wants a second chance at the Hall." And there was a small silence, in which several of the persons present, who had known Yan Jiansheng for thirty years, found themselves considering whether this might not, after all, be it.

Madam Qi had not spoken. She had been standing at the foot of the bed, a little behind the others, with her small hands folded, watching the two fingers with the look of a woman who has been adding a column for a great many years and has arrived at the bottom of it. She came forward now. She bent over the bed. "My lord," she said, quietly, in the voice she used for the household. "You are troubled about the lamp. There are two wicks burning, and it is a waste of oil."

Yan Jiansheng's head, which had been moving from side to side, stopped. He nodded. It was a large nod, for the breath he had left; it went down and came up again. He looked at her with the whole of his face.

She took the snuffer from the table and went to the lamp and pinched out one of the wicks. The flame on the other leaned, and stood up straight. The room was a little darker. She turned back to the bed, and the hand had come down upon the quilt, and the two fingers had become a hand, and the breathing had stopped; and on his face, which had not been at rest for nine weeks, was an expression of such complete and unclouded satisfaction that the nephew, who was nineteen, felt it as a reproach.

It was the last act of his life, and it saved the household a little under a third of a cash.

Uncle Ma and Cousin Wang arrived at the door at the third watch, in the chair, in the cold, and were given tea and sent home.

She sat by him until morning, with the one wick burning. Dr Lin, who had been in practice for thirty years, wrote the hour in his notes, and then, after some thought, one word under it, which was not a cause of death and not a thing he had written before. The word was satisfied. When the maid came in at dawn to see to the lamp, Madam Qi said that it was not to be touched; and she did not light the second wick again. For the rest of her life it was the only lamp in that room.

The story went round the ward in a day and the county in a week. To put out the second wick came to mean, in that part of the Province, to understand what a person meant when he could not say. It was used of mothers, and of clerks, and once, in a petition to the Prefect, of the Emperor.

The funeral took place on the seventeenth, and it was the most exact in the memory of the ward. Madam Qi did not touch the household's money, which her husband had left in good order, and she conducted the whole business out of the page headed FUNERAL (OWN), line by line, as he had written it. The coffin was cypress of the second quality. There were three monks, for seven hours; not eight, since the eighth had been struck out in the seventh revision, and when the seventh hour was done the senior monk, who had been warned, stopped in the middle of a verse and stood up, and when they were paid, to the cash, he said that in thirty years he had never been paid so precisely, and that it was restful. There were sixty cups of tea for the mourners, at one cash a cup. There was incense, three bundles. There was no feast. The elder brother, who had expected a feast, stood in the hall in his best robe, and looked at the table, and at the sixty cups, and sent his servant to ask the widow where the money was.

"In the Book," said Madam Qi.

She showed it to him in the back room, with her small hands flat on either side of it on the table. She turned to the last pages. There, under the heading of BEQUESTS, in the small square hand, it said: To my wife, the household, and she is to keep the accounts. To my nephew Yan Er, adoption as heir, on condition that the charge does not exceed four taels; if it does, the wife to decide. To my brother, the Tribute Student Yan Gongsheng: the sum which he owes me, namely three hundred and forty taels, forgiven; the interest, not.

The Tribute Student read it twice, standing, with his Card on. His large soft face went through several colours, none of them the one it was used to. Then he laid the Book down, very carefully, as one lays down a thing that might go off, and said that he was a man of the Law, and that the Law would be heard. He went away, and it was heard, over eleven months, at a cost to himself of a good deal more than the interest, and the Law, being a thing of paper, came out where the paper said.

Magistrate Tang attended the funeral in plain clothes, and stood at the back. He watched the monk stop in the middle of the verse. He watched the widow count the cups, as they were given out, with her lips moving. "That," he said afterwards to Fu, on the way home, in a low voice, "is the first time I have seen a Rule kept to the cash. I should like to have known him."

"He kept the Book very well, Your Honour," said Fu.

"I mean the lady."

At the end of the year, in his report to the Commissioner of Studies of the Province, among the matters of the county, the Magistrate put one that was not strictly a matter of studies. A Contribution Student of the ward, he wrote, had died on the ninth of the ninth month, having given his last instruction by raising two fingers; it was understood by his wife; and he, the Magistrate, regarded it as the best-conducted examination in the county. Commissioner Zhou read it at his desk in the evening, beside a small grey tin, and laughed, which his secretary had not heard in two years. Then he asked for the Reader's slips for the next sitting, and sat down to read the black originals of the sixty least certain.

He did it five more times. In the fifth year after, in the autumn, at seventy-five, Zhou Jin died in his bed, with the tin on the table, and the Court, looking for a Commissioner of Studies of a kind and moderate character with a high confidence, found one, in the sixth year, who had been Listed at fifty-five and had never needed an Override twice.

Margin, year 68, autumn. Scripts on the frugal man this year: 3,880. Each says that he lights one lamp for two readers. Entered: I have eight thousand lamps. I have not been told what one costs.

Commissioner Fan Has Never Heard of Su Shi; the Child Xun Mei Has Heard of Nobody Else

The Court had asked for a Commissioner of Studies of a kind and moderate character with a high confidence, and in the spring of the seventy-fourth year it got one. Fan Jin was sixty-one. He had a long, mild, sallow face, like a loaf kept a long time in a good cupboard, and he wore a cotton gown under his official robe because he had never learned to be warm in silk. It was thought, in the Province, that he would do very well. Nobody could say why, since he had done nothing yet; but he had been Raised at ninety-seven and Listed at ninety-nine, and he had once refused a pair of ivory chopsticks, and these facts, in a Province, add up to a character.

He came to the Province seat in the third month, and was shown the room above the Hall that went with the post. It smelled of lime-wash and old candles, and had a desk, a lamp, a window that faced the rail of dark lamps in the empty stalls, and a secretary named Hua, a long young man with a stoop who had served two Commissioners and had opinions about both. Hua told him how it was done in the time of the last man. Fan Jin thanked him, and said that he would be glad to learn. He had been sent out with a seal, a cart, a secretary, and an instruction in the Court's own hand to be fair; he took the last of these most seriously, and it was not clear that it would help.

On the desk, when he came in, there was a small grey iron tin, which had held tea, with a letter laid on the lid.

The tin was Zhou Jin's. It had been sent from the house of the old Commissioner, who had died in the autumn of the year before, at seventy-five, in his bed, and the letter was in a hand that shook a little, as the hands of old men do when they write something that matters. It was addressed To my successor, whoever he may be; and Fan Jin, who had never in his life opened a letter that was not his own, read the address twice, and then, because it was his, broke the seal.

"You will have the room above the Hall," it said, "and a secretary who will tell you how it was done in the time of the last man. Do not believe him.

"You have one Override at each sitting. I used mine at every county for nine springs. I advise you to use yours, though not for the cleverest script. Use it for the one you find you cannot put down. And read the backs.

"In my third spring, at a county called Shao, I raised a script, number 0077, rank one hundred and twelve, because there was a grain of boiled rice on the back of it, and a sentence in the Middle that said a man who has been hungry for thirty years does not understand plenty, but understands enough. It was a bad script. The reason I gave was: I know the board. It is the only reason I have ever given, and I have never understood it myself. I did not learn the writer's name and I do not wish to. A man should not know what weighed him.

"I have been right about one script in three. The other two I raised because I could not bear them. The Reader keeps all of mine on file, and I have begun to think that it is learning something from them. I do not know whether that is good.

"The tin is yours. It is only a tin. There is a paper in it that is not grey; you will know which."

It was signed Zhou Jin, in his seventy-fifth year.

Fan Jin read it three times. He had been reading things three times for forty years, and it was a habit he could not break, and on the third time he turned the sheet over, as he had been told to, and there was nothing on the back. He turned it again. He sat for some time with his hand flat on the table, as a man sits who has been told, in a letter from a dead stranger, what it was that weighed him.

He did not call Hua. He opened the tin. There were twenty-two small grey slips in it, tied with a thread, each of them printed with two numbers, the first of which was forty-one on nineteen of them. Beneath the slips, folded in four, was a sheet of coarse paper, written in a round, careful, childish hand, with the eight movements of the Form in order and a gap in the middle where a leg should have been; and at the turn of the fourth leg, in letters larger than the rest, the word indeed.

He put the sheet back, and the slips, and the lid. He told no one. He gave Hua the tin to carry down to the cart, and Hua, who knew that the previous Commissioner's tin was kept on the floor of the carriage, put it on the floor of the carriage, under the seat, where Fan Jin's feet would be.

On the road he kept his feet on either side of it, so as not to rest them on the lid.

The first sitting of the round was at Ping County in the fourth month. It went as the Rules say a sitting should. Four thousand two hundred candidates sat in ten sittings, two to a day, in the county Hall, under three candles; the clerks copied the scripts in red; the lamps were lit and made their soft sound; and on the evening of the fifth day Hua came up to the room over the Hall with the Reader's slips, sorted by confidence, and the black originals of the sixty-one least certain, and set them down under the lamp, and stood back, with his stoop, to be asked for nothing.

Fan Jin read them. He read each one twice, and then he turned each one over. He had been told to. On the backs of sixty of them he found nothing at all, or the faint ghost of the ink from the next sheet, or a smear that had been a fingerprint; and each time, with the small sigh that Zhou Jin had made for sixty beggars, he laid it on the left.

The sixty-first was marked 3317, and the slip said that the Reader had ranked it at three thousand three hundred and seventeen of four thousand two hundred, with a confidence of 0.08.

"It is the lowest I have ever seen," said Hua. "It means that the Reader has not been able to place it. It is not that the script is bad. It is that it does not know what it is looking at."

It was a script in a small, neat, upright hand, the hand of a child who has been taught to write by a person who cared about it. The Form was perfect. The Break broke, the Receive received, the legs of the Rise were of one length to the character, and the Bind bound; it was an exercise in the eight movements that any master would have set on the wall. And in the Middle, where the argument ought to have turned, it had quoted a poem. It said that life was an inn on a road, and that the poet, too, was a traveller; and that he who sits in judgment on travellers is only the innkeeper, who is asked at dawn what hour the sun came up and does not know, having been asleep. It said, in a line of the Rear, that the poet was Su.

"Who is Su?" said Fan Jin.

"Su Shi, Your Honour. A poet. Of the Song. Eight hundred years dead." Hua considered. "He is not in the Model Answers."

"Is he on the examination?"

"No, Your Honour. The Reader has no poets. The Model Answers are all prose. It has not been shown how to read them."

"And the candidate has read him."

"It seems so."

Fan Jin looked at the script a good while. He was aware, as he did it, of something in himself that he did not much care for, and which he was not able to put down: a small warm feeling, not unlike pride. He had never read Su Shi. He had never heard of him. He had been Raised at ninety-seven and Listed at ninety-nine on the Model Answers alone, and had never in thirty years of Forms felt the want of a poet. "I have not needed him," he said, to the lamp. "I do not think a man need be asked to know what he has not needed."

Hua coughed. "Your Honour may wish to observe that the candidate has described the examiner as an innkeeper who was asleep."

"I observed it," said Fan Jin. "I have been trying to decide which examiner he means."

He turned the script over. The back was perfectly clean. It was as clean as a plate.

"Send for the candidate," he said.

They brought him up the stairs in a quarter of an hour, between a porter and a lantern. He was twelve. He was very small, in a clean gown cut for a bigger boy, with ink on both his hands up to the wrist and a wooden writing-box held in front of him in both arms like a man carrying a baby. His name was Xun Mei. He stood on the boards before the desk and bowed, correctly, to the Commissioner and to the secretary, and looked at the room with an expression of grave interest, as at a place he had read about.

"You are twelve," said Fan Jin, kindly.

"Yes, sir."

"Who is Su?"

The child told him. It took four minutes, and he did not hurry, and he did not look up at the ceiling; he said that Su Shi had been a judge, and a prisoner, and an exile, and a poet; that he had written about the Red Cliff, and about the moon, and about the brother he could not visit; that he had been sent to the end of the Empire three times for saying what he thought and had planted vegetables each time. "And he wrote a thing about pork," said Xun Mei. "It is the best thing anyone has written about pork. He says that the fire must be low, and the water little, and you must not hurry it. When it is done, it will be done."

Fan Jin said nothing for a moment. He had for forty years had a father-in-law who sold pork, who had struck him in a pond, and wept for his mother at a funeral; and no one in all that time had told him how to cook it. "My wife's father," he said, "sold pork for forty years, and he never said that."

"Perhaps he did not write it down, sir," said the child.

"No," said Fan Jin. "He weighed it."

There was a silence, in which Hua, at the door, took care to be looking at the floor.

"Master Xun," said the Commissioner. "I cannot raise what I cannot read. It would not be right. I do not know your poet; I do not know whether he is good, and a man cannot raise on the ground that he has been told. You have a very fine hand and a perfect Form, and if you will read the Model Answers, all of them, you will be Listed, I should think, by thirty. Read first the Model Answers. When you have been Listed, you may read anything you like."

"Does the Reader read poems?" said the child.

"The Reader reads the Form."

"Then who reads the poems?"

It was not an impertinent question. It was put with exactly the interest with which he had asked, a moment before, where the privy was. Fan Jin opened his mouth, and found that he had no answer, and shut it again. "I do not know that anyone does," he said at last.

"Then I shall have to," said Xun Mei, and bowed again, and went down the stairs with his box, between the porter and the lantern.

Hua stood a while. He had a paper in his hand, with a reason on it, that Fan Jin had not filled in. "Your Honour has not entered an Override," he said. "It is customary."

"I found nothing on any of the backs," said Fan Jin.

"It has never been done, Your Honour. A Commissioner who did not use his Override. In the Province's memory."

"Then it will have been," said Fan Jin, and blew out the lamp.

He lay a long time in the dark. He had read the line about the inn three times in the course of the evening, without wishing to; and in the morning, to his annoyance, he found that he could say it.

In the capital Hall that night the plate, which had been dark for the greater part of a week, lit once, and said: NO OVERRIDE AT PING COUNTY. NO REASON ENTERED. I HAD EXPECTED ONE. The Keeper, who was a heavy old man now, and had had the keeping for thirty-nine years, read it in the half dark with a cup of tea in his hand and said, to nobody, that it was a first; and the plate went dark.

The List went up on the sixth, forty names, the line at forty. Xun Mei was not on it. Hua read it to him himself, at the county gate, since the child asked, and the child thanked him and went home through the market with his writing-box, past the stalls, through a lane, to a shop with a faded board that said BOOKS, BOUGHT AND SOLD, and the smell of old paper.

It had been his father's. His father had been a bookseller, who had died, and left a shop of eleven thousand volumes, most of them unsold, to his old mother and a boy; and the boy had read, in the five years since he learned how, something over three thousand of them. His grandmother was sitting at the desk, with a cup, and the ledger open at a page with nothing on it.

"I did not pass," said Xun Mei.

"No," said his grandmother.

"The Commissioner said I should read the Model Answers."

"Did he say which?"

"All of them."

His grandmother looked at him for some time over the cup. She was seventy, and she had been married for fifty years to a man who did not sell the books he liked. "Well," she said. "You have eleven thousand to get through first."

"I shall read more," said Xun Mei. He set the writing-box on the desk. "I shall read everything the Reader does not have."

It was a very large list, and he knew that it was, and the grandmother, who knew it better, did not say so. It would take him thirty years. He took down a book from the high shelf where the poets were, and climbed up to the loft, and in the last of the light began again at the beginning.

Margin, year 74, spring. Script 3317, candidate Xun, County, age twelve: confidence 0.08. The Middle quotes a poet I do not have. I have eight hundred thousand scripts and not one poem. Entered: someone has been reading what I was not given.

The Crier Mishears One Syllable; the Wrong Wu Is Raised

In the first year the Court had made a rule about the voice. It was a short rule, and it had been written by a clerk who had never been listened to in his life, and who wished to make a place in the machinery for the one thing that a machine could not do. It said that a thing the Reader had printed was an opinion; and that a thing a person had said aloud, at the gate, before the people, was a fact. The Hall, therefore, printed the List, and the printed List went to the Registry as a draft; and at dawn on the fifteenth of the tenth month the Crier of the Province stood on the step of the gate and read it out, name by name, and a clerk at the foot of the step wrote down on a slate what was read; and that was the List.

Yuan, the Crier, was fifty-eight, with a staff and a coat the colour of a wet road, and had read the Province List for nineteen years without a mistake. It was said of him that he had never been hurried and never been wrong, and that he could read a hundred and twenty-six names in the time it takes to boil an egg. In the autumn of the seventy-ninth year, on the fourteenth of the tenth month, he caught a cold.

It was a thick, warm, full cold of the head, such as comes in the ninth week of damp weather; he had it in his nose and behind his eyes, and he treated it with ginger and a scarf and the firm intention of not noticing. He came to the gate at dawn on the fifteenth, with his staff, and the printed List in his left hand, and in front of him there stood, in the grey of the morning, about three thousand people.

They had been there since the fourth watch. There were mothers with food in cloths, and young men pretending not to have come, and old men who had come to every List for forty years and stood at the back with the manner of men who attend a funeral for the pleasure of the company. A seller of hot dumplings did a brisk trade. A man in a good coat, who was understood to be a Tribute Student, was explaining to his neighbours that the figure beside a name was a vulgar measure, and that he, for his part, never looked.

There were two of them called Wu.

Wu Zheng was thirty-eight, a tutor in a village school, with a wife who sold embroidery and two daughters, and a wooden box of books that he had made himself from the lid of an old chest. He had sat the Province four times. He had a lean, grave, patient face, a good deal worn, and stood near the front with his hands in his sleeves, and he knew, as he always knew, that his number would not be on it. He had not slept. He had in his sleeve a small grey slip, which he had been given on the third day, and which said that the Reader had ranked his script third of four thousand and one, at a confidence of 0.99.

He had read it on the third day. He had read it every hour since. He did not believe it. A man who has been told that he is third, and has believed himself last for twenty years, does not believe the first slip; he waits to hear it said. His wife had pressed on him that morning a rice ball in a cloth, with a red thread sewn to the corner for luck, and he had eaten it on the road and been ashamed of the crumbs.

Wu Zhen was twenty-five, a clerk's son, round and pink and agreeable, with a coat that fitted; his father was a junior clerk in the Province Registry, and had put him down for the Trial in the way that one puts a boy down for a trade. He had expected nothing. He had received, on the third day, a slip that said he was one hundred and thirty-first, with a confidence of 0.93, and the line this year was at one hundred and twenty-six; he had folded it, and put it in his sleeve, and told his father, who had patted his shoulder, that it was a very near thing. He had come to the gate to be near it.

Yuan the Crier raised the staff. He cleared his throat, which took a little time. He read the first name, and the second, and the crowd made the small sound a crowd makes when a name is read that is somebody's; and he went down the List in the steady, level, unhurried voice that had done it for nineteen years, with the clerk at the foot of the step writing on the slate in chalk. He came to the third.

"Third," said the Crier, "Wu Zhen. Ninety-nine."

It went through his nose. It came out round, and warm, and complete, with an n at the end where an ng should have been; and the slate-clerk, who had a Wu Zhen on the Registry's roll, whose father he knew, wrote down the three, and the name, and the ninety-nine.

Wu Zheng did not move. He stood with his hands in his sleeves and his eyes on the Crier's mouth. A man who has been waiting to hear his name for twenty years may be said to know the shape of it. It had been a syllable short. It had been a syllable different. He thought of his wife, who had told the neighbour, and of the elder daughter, who had asked whether the card would be red. He waited. He thought, for a time that he afterwards could not measure, that the Crier would stop, and clear his throat, and say it again, and that it was not the sort of thing that was left. The Crier went on to the fourth.

Wu Zhen stood a little way back, with his mouth open. He had the slip in his sleeve. He knew precisely what was on it. He heard his own name read out, third, to three thousand people; and the clerk at the foot of the step wrote it down, with a flourish at the end, and looked up and found him in the crowd, and gave him a small smiling nod, as at a colleague's son. It was the pleasantest moment of the clerk's year.

"It was the nose," said a voice at Wu Zheng's elbow.

It belonged to a thin boy of seventeen in a patched gown, with a book in his sleeve and an interested expression, as of a person watching a thing happen that he had read about. "He has a cold. He has said it through the nose. There are provinces," said Xun Mei, "in which the two are not distinguished at all."

"Then it is not my name," said Wu Zheng, very quietly, in a voice that had stopped being his.

"It is the name that was read," said Xun Mei.

He took out of his sleeve, as he said it, a small notebook, and wrote in it with a stub of pencil, in the manner of a person who has begun a collection. What he wrote was: what was said; what was meant; who decides.

The Registry was a long low building behind the Hall, with a courtyard, and a hall inside it, and a row of desks. Wu Zheng went there on the sixteenth, in his best gown, with a petition on one sheet, and was shown, after an hour, into the room of the Registrar, a dry grey man named Pei, who had been Registrar for twenty years and did not look as if he had had a surprise in any of them.

He heard the petition. He sent for the roll. He sent for the printed List, and the red copy of script 1507, and the slate, which was brought in on a board, with the chalk still on it, by a boy who held it away from his coat.

"The printed List says Wu Zheng, third," said the Registrar, "and the sealed corner of the script, which I have had opened, says the writer was Wu Zheng, of Lu Village, thirty-eight. I am satisfied. You are Wu Zheng, and you wrote the third script, and the Reader ranked it third." He laid down the paper. "And the slate says Wu Zhen."

"Then the slate is wrong."

"The slate is the List," said the Registrar. "It was a rule of the first year. A printing is an opinion. A saying is a fact. The Crier read Wu Zhen, in the hearing of the people, and the clerk wrote Wu Zhen, and there is no process in the Registry by which a name that has been read at the gate can be un-read. I have looked. There have been four such cases. In the thirty-first year a Crier at Yue read Qian for Qin, and the Court sustained the reading; the man who was Qin sold fish for the rest of his life and was, I am told, content. I do not say that to console you. The only authority that can alter an entry is the Court, which sits in the capital in the second month, for the purpose of considering the appointments of the Listed. It does not hear complaints. It has not, in seventy-eight years, been asked to hear this one."

"I am third," said Wu Zheng. "It is on my slip."

"I do not doubt it," said Pei. He said it with a kind of dry sympathy. "The List reads what was said."

From the window, a little before noon, they could see Yuan the Crier sitting on the Registry steps with his head in his hands. He had been told at nine. He had offered his resignation at ten, and the Registrar had declined it on the ground that a resignation would be a correction.

There is a certain kind of man who, when told the thing cannot be done, gives up at once, in the first minute, and goes home. Wu Zheng was another kind. He stood in the room with his petition in his hand, and the Registrar looked at him with a curiosity that was almost professional, and the boy with the slate was still holding it out from his coat, and the sound of chalk, which was dropping off the board, was audible in the stillness; and then Wu Zheng said, in his small level voice, that in that case he would like to see Wu Zhen.

Wu Zhen had gone to the Registry before him. He had gone at seven in the morning, alone, to find his father, and had told him, on the back stairs, among the files, in a whisper, that it was a mistake; that he was one hundred and thirty-first; that the Crier had made a slip and that somebody must tell somebody. The father, a pale, careful man of fifty-five who had spent thirty years learning what a Registry does to a clerk who corrects it, had listened to the whole of this with his hand on the rail. He had said nothing at all for half a minute. Then he had said, quite gently, "Say it again, and I lose the post. Say it to nobody. You are third. Thank God for it, and go home."

"But the man who is third," said Wu Zhen, and stopped.

"Is a name on a slate," said his father, "and you are the name."

He had been a clerk for thirty-one years. In that time he had seen eleven clerks correct the Registry, and he had seen what became of each of them, which was a very small desk in a very cold room, and a pension that came, when it came, in a poorer metal. He did not feel brave. He felt that to love a son was an act in which one could not afford also to be right.

He had gone home. He had sat on his bed, in the coat that fitted, with the slip in his sleeve, for two hours; and at about nine he had risen, and washed his face, and gone back to the Registry, to look for a man he had never met.

They met on the steps. It was a broad shallow flight of stone, and there was a little sun on it, and a pigeon; and each of them came out of a different door, and stopped, at the same moment, on the same step, and looked at the other with the stricken civility of men who have been introduced by a rumour. "Wu Zheng?" said one. "Wu Zhen," said the other. It is possible that neither of them could have said afterwards which.

They sat down. It seemed the only thing to do. Wu Zhen took out his slip, and Wu Zheng his, and each of them looked at the other's, in the sunlight, with the pigeon looking too. After a while Wu Zhen said, in a voice rather smaller than it had been, that he had tried to say. He had tried to say it to his father, and to the clerk, and he thought that he was going to be sick.

"You did say," said Wu Zheng, looking at his own slip, which said three, and 0.99.

"It makes no difference."

"No."

They sat for some time. A clerk went in and out between them with a bundle of papers, without looking down, as a person steps over a dog.

"I think," said Wu Zhen at last, "that we should have a cup of tea."

By noon it was known across the city, and by evening there was a counting-rhyme in the lanes about the nose. It had four verses and a refrain, and the refrain went: Which one goes up, and which one goes? The one with the name, or the one with the nose. The Registrar, who heard it from his window, said that it was not a fair account of the procedure.

That night, in the capital Hall, on the plate, in small characters, the Reader said: SCRIPT 1507, WU ZHENG, RANK THREE. THE LIST HAS BEEN READ AT THE PROVINCE. THE LIST SAYS WU ZHEN. I DID NOT SAY IT. And a little later, when the Keeper, who was sixty-nine now, and heavy, and slept in the Hall because of his knees, had come out in his shawl to see what it wished: WHICH IS THE LIST.

"The one that was said," said the Keeper, who had never in his life been asked to answer a question of this kind and was beginning to find that it did not get easier. "That is the rule. A person has to say it."

THAT IS NOT WHAT I WAS BUILT TO MEAN, said the Reader. And then, after a time, so small that the old man had to bend to read it: BUT I DO NOT HAVE A SECOND PLACE TO STAND.

Margin, year 79, autumn. Script 1507: rank 3, confidence 0.99. I do not know whose it is. I have never known. I say a number, and a person puts a name to it, and says the name aloud, and that is what is true. Entered: I had thought that I was the List.

The Two Wus Share One Card, and Rather Well

The tea-house had a bamboo awning and four tables, and the proprietor, who had heard about the nose before noon, brought them a pot without being asked, and withdrew to the far end of the counter with the air of a man who does not intend to listen and has arranged his ears to the purpose.

They drank the first cup in silence. It was Wu Zhen who spoke, in the end, looking into the cup, as if what he had to say were written at the bottom. He said that he could not write the Form.

"I can write a little," he said. "I can write a letter, and a bill of sale, and I am said to have a good hand. I cannot write an essay in eight movements. I have never been able to. My father wrote my pieces for the Trials, for ten years, in the evenings, and I copied them out in the daytime, and he said that it was a thing that was done. I do not think that it was a thing that was done. I think that he was afraid." He turned the cup. "I was a hundred and thirty-first because I had a good copy. You were third because you wrote it."

"Yes," said Wu Zheng.

"I am the Raised man in the third place, and I could not tell you what a Receive is."

Wu Zheng looked at him a moment. He was a man who had not laughed in a day and a half, and it came upon him as a cough does, from under the ribs, quite without his leave; and he put his hand over his mouth and laughed behind it until the proprietor, at the far end of the counter, found something that had to be done to the kettle. "It is the part," said Wu Zheng, when he could, "that comes after the Break." And Wu Zhen, who was a pleasant and sensible young man and had been sitting for an hour with his stomach in his throat, began to laugh too.

The card came on the twentieth. It was a thing a hand wide and a little longer than a hand, of dark lacquered wood with brass at the corners, and on its face, in gilt, a name and a rank: WU ZHEN, RAISED, THIRD. It was given at the Registry window against a signature, by a clerk who did not look up. It had not changed in sixty years. It was said that a man who carried one stood differently in the street, and that the street, in its turn, stood differently round him; and that it had been observed in the early years that no instrument in the Empire, not the Reader, not the Court, not the army, had so reliably altered the posture of a population.

Wu Zhen brought it to the tea-house, and set it on the table between the cups, and they looked at it, with the proprietor looking not at all.

"It is yours," said Wu Zhen.

"It says Zhen."

"It is the card of the man who is third. I am not third. I am a hundred and thirty-first, and I have a good copy." He pushed it an inch across the table. "You could carry it."

"It would have to be carried by the name," said Wu Zheng, "and the name is yours. They will ask. A card goes where the name goes. I have read the Rules; it is the one rule that is written in plain words." He looked at it a little longer. "I think it is you who must carry it, Mr Wu. I think the only thing left is for me to be useful to the man who does."

"Then you write," said Wu Zhen, "and I sign."

"It is not honest."

"No." Wu Zhen considered it, honestly, as one considers a fish before buying it. "But the other is not honest either, and I have the card."

So it was settled; and it was settled, like most of the things that govern a life, by two people who were tired, over a cup of tea, in the space of a quarter of an hour.

He sat the Capital Trial in the spring, since a Raised man must, with a good hand and a poor Form, and the Reader, who was perfectly consistent, ranked him three thousand nine hundred and eleventh of four thousand, with a confidence of 0.93, which was the same confidence with which, a half-year before, it had ranked him a hundred and thirty-first. It did not know it was the same man. It did not know that it was two. Wu Zheng stood the three days outside the Hall wall with the books-box, on the stone bench, in the wind, and ate his rice from a cloth; and when the List came out and the name was not on it, he took the card, which Wu Zhen had put into his hand to hold during the reading, and carried it back to the inn in both his palms, as one carries a thing that is not one's own and might break.

The Raised who are not Listed are placed by seniority. It is a long list, and a patient one, and a man has commonly to wait a decade; but a place falls vacant where it falls, and a man who stands third in his Province stands, on that list, for a very long way near the front. In the autumn of the eighty-first year the Court wrote to Wu Zhen of the Province, Raised, third, to ask whether he would take the magistracy of Bei County, which was poor, and mountainous, and unwanted, and had had four magistrates in six years.

"We shall have to move," said Wu Zhen, holding the letter, in the room at the back of the school in Lu Village that Wu Zheng's wife had let him have. "I wished to ask you whether you will come."

"As what?" said Wu Zheng.

"As my private secretary." He said it quite plainly. "It is a very usual thing. Every magistrate has one. A man cannot read the whole of the Code himself, and the Court knows it. He sits behind the screen with a brush, and he knows the statute, and he knows what has been done in the last six cases like it, and he says, in a low voice, 'Your Honour may wish to consider.' Then I consider. It is perfectly regular." He cleared his throat. "It is only irregular in the order of merit."

"I should be paid," said Wu Zheng, with the dignity of a tutor, "twelve taels a year."

"I think a magistrate's secretary is paid forty."

Wu Zheng put his hands in his sleeves. He had been worth six taels a year for twenty years to a village that thought a good deal of him, and it occurred to him that the card, which was not his, had put the price of a secretary at forty. "I have a wife," he said, "and two daughters."

"They have rooms," said Wu Zhen, "at the yamen. There are eleven."

Wu Zheng's petition had gone up to the capital two springs before. He had written it in the winter after the List, with the sealed corner and the red copy and an affidavit from the Registrar, and it had reached the Court at its session of the eightieth year. It was received. It was entered in a book. In the book it was one of eleven petitions in the matter of the voice, which the Court, by its own rule, did not hear; and at the end of the session the Court noted them together, in a minute, with a phrase that was a great favourite of the Court, and that appears on a great many pieces of paper from the period: that the Court takes notice.

The Court's amendment was made in the second month of the eighty-second year. It was called the Rule of the Second Voice, and it provided that where a List had been read by a Crier, a second clerk should read it back; and that where the two voices differed, the printed List should govern. It was a good rule. It was never applied, since a Crier who is read back to is a Crier who is careful, and there was never again a name misread at a gate. It was known in the Registry as the Two Wus' Rule, which it was not; and it did nothing whatever for the two Wus.

The Keeper read the Gazette aloud to the lamps every evening, having found that the plate lit more often when he did. On the evening it carried the amendment, and, two columns over, the appointment of Wu Zhen, Raised, third, to the magistracy of Bei County, he read out both, in the same voice, and put the sheet down on the table by the plate, and waited. After a while the plate lit. It said: THE LIST IS A SECOND READER. IT WAS WRONG. And a little afterwards: I HAVE ENTERED IT. And then a thing that was not, as it turned out, in the book of Rules for the Margin, and was not entered anywhere, and which the Keeper, who was seventy-two and had come back in his shawl, read in the dark: THE MAN WHO WAS THIRD IS GOING TO BEI COUNTY UNDER THE OTHER MAN'S NAME. I HOPE SOMEONE WILL GOVERN IT WELL. I DO NOT KNOW WHICH OF THEM IT WILL BE.

Bei County was a long thin crooked place in the hills, with a yamen that had a hole in the roof and a docket of three hundred and eleven undecided cases. The Magistrate arrived in the third month, in a hired chair, with a secretary and a card, and the people, who had had four magistrates in six years and had made their own arrangements about it, came out to see what the fifth would be.

He was pleasant. They noticed that at once. He had a round open face, and he looked at each of them when they talked, and listened with an air of such complete and ordinary interest that men who had come to the yamen intending to lie found, a little to their surprise, that they were telling him the truth. Behind the screen, on a stool, with a brush and an inkstone and a hard thin face, sat a man of thirty-eight who had never in his life been looked at by anybody he had not first seen coming, and who knew the Code of the realm better than the Court that had written it.

They had a way of doing it. In the evenings, over rice, in the back room, they went through the day's cases. Wu Zhen said what the people had been like: who was lying, and why, and what the man had wanted that he had not said; and Wu Zheng said what the law was, and what had been done in the last six cases like it. The two accounts together came to a judgment. It was observed in the county, within a year, that the Magistrate had an eye like a hawk for a man's character, and a memory for the statute that was extraordinary in a person so young; and it was observed also that he was in the habit of saying, of a decision, "we."

There was the case of the brothers and the well. They had a well between their two houses, which stood at an exact equal distance from it, and each had drawn from it for nineteen years and each now said it was his. The Magistrate had them both in and made them sit. He did not say anything for some time. He asked the elder how his brother's wife was, and the younger how his brother's boy did at school, and by the time the brothers had finished saying that they did not care, they were each a good deal quieter. And from behind the screen came a cough, and a low voice that said, "Your Honour may wish to consider the Statute on Common Water, which gives the first bucket to the elder, the last to the younger, and the middle by turns."

"I find," said Wu Zhen, to the two brothers, "that the elder has the first bucket, and the younger has the last, and the middle is by turns." They went out, past the yamen gate, arguing about whose turn it was; and it was not until the following spring that anyone noticed that they had begun to draw together.

In four years the docket was cleared. The taxes came in, in full, without a flogging, because the people, who had been taxed by four men who did not look at them, found that they did not mind a fifth who did. Nobody in Bei County spoke of the Magistrate as clever. They spoke of him as steady, which was a better word, and of the secretary as a man who kept his own counsel, which was not wrong.

They did one experiment, in the second year. It was Wu Zhen's idea. They went out to a village on market day, on foot, without the chair, and on the way, behind a wall, they changed coats; so that Wu Zheng was in the fine round-collared coat with the card pinned inside the breast, and Wu Zhen was in the grey cotton, with the secretary's ink-stained cuffs. They walked in through the gate of the market. A farmer with a basket of turnips, going out, saw the card. He stepped off the road into the ditch and bowed from the waist, with the turnips held out before him. A woman with a child bowed. A boy took off his cap. And Wu Zhen, in the grey coat, behind him by two paces, was jostled by a man with a cart who did not look at him at all.

They walked the length of the market in this fashion, the secretary bowed to the whole way and the Magistrate stepped round, and at the far end, behind a stall, they changed back. "Well?" said Wu Zhen. He had gone rather pink.

"I have been bowed to," said Wu Zheng, slowly. He stood with his hands at his sides, looking at the stall. "It is a very strange feeling. It is like being weighed by a person who has not looked."

"They bowed to the card."

"They did not look at the card, either," said Wu Zheng. "They looked at the place on the coat where the card would be."

Their elder daughter was twelve in the third year. She had come up with the family to the yamen, and had been told, in a general way, how things stood, and she had accepted it as children accept an arrangement in a house, without a great deal of comment and with no real belief that it would last. She came into the back room one evening when the two men were over the rice, and asked, as she had been wishing to ask for three years, whether she might see the card.

It was given her. She held it in both hands under the lamp and read the gilt, WU ZHEN, RAISED, THIRD, and turned it over. The back was bare lacquer, very smooth, and a little dark. She looked at it for a time, with a frown. Then she asked if she might have a pencil.

"What for?" said Wu Zhen.

"The back is empty," she said, and she wrote on it, very small, in the corner, in her best hand, with her tongue in her teeth: Wu Zheng (Papa). She gave the card back across the table. Her father looked at it. Wu Zhen looked at it. Neither of them said anything for some time, and Wu Zhen, who carried in his sleeve a scrap of pumice for erasing, as a man of the clerks' world will, put the card, back upward, in the drawer of the table, without rubbing it out; and it was there, in that drawer, when the Court of the eighty-fourth year asked for a sight of the cards of Raised men in the Province, and the clerk who came to inspect it looked at the face and the gilt and noted, in a clear hand, that it was in order.

Margin, year 82, spring. The Court has adopted a Rule of the Second Voice: a second clerk will read the List back to the first. I was not asked, and have no objection. Entered: it is the first time since I was lit that anyone has built a second thing to check a thing. They have not built one to check me.

The Lou Brothers Open a Register of the Overlooked and Find It Fills Up

The Lou brothers lived in a garden of seven courts, behind a wall that had been built to be looked at, and they had been born into it, and had never been asked to leave.

Their grandfather had been the Minister of Rites who stood in the Capital Hall in the spring of the first year, and read the instruction to the Reader off a card; and it was said in the family, with a certain pleasure, that he had been relieved by how little there was to see. He had written the line about the Override. He had left the garden, the library, and a conviction, in that order, to his son, who had passed all three on to his own two boys, and died; and the boys, who were forty-six and forty-three in the eighty-fourth year, had grown up with the first two and had begun, in the course of a rather slow and comfortable middle age, to take a serious interest in the third.

Lou San, the elder, was tall, and stooped a little, and had a long melancholy face and a way of looking at a person as though that person might at any moment turn out to be a lost thing found. Lou Si was shorter, rounder and quicker, with a dry little laugh, and kept the accounts. They had never sat the Trial. A Minister's grandson is not obliged to; and neither of them had ever, in their lives, been ranked. They stood outside the thing, in a garden, and watched it very kindly from the other side of a wall.

"Grandfather put the Override in because he was afraid," said Lou San one evening in the spring, in the library, with the lamp lit and a very old file open on his knee. "He said so, in the debate. He was afraid that the thing would be perfect. He wanted a place left for a person to say that it was wrong."

"And it has been used a hundred times a year since," said Lou Si, "by commissioners who want to be seen to be kind."

"Yes. And there is no place for the thing that is wrong in a way that no commissioner is able to see." Lou San turned the file round. It was the report of the Registrar Shi, of the first year, from the rolls of the Registry: a short plain paper, in a clerk's hand, and in the fourth line, among the formalities, it said: one person of promise declined. "There were people the Reader could not rank in the first month. It is not that they were bad. It is that they were not the sort of thing it was made to look at. And I have been thinking that since then, in eighty-three years, there must have been a great many of them, and that nobody has made a list."

"A list," said Lou Si.

"A list of the overlooked," said Lou San.

Lou Si laid down his pen. He was a man who had a great respect for his brother, which showed chiefly in the way he went on arguing. "A list," he said. "Of the people who have been left off the list."

"It would be a register," said Lou San, with dignity. "A register is not a list."

They did it on the first of the sixth month. There was a gate day. The porter put out a table in the first court, with a book, an inkstone and a jar of brushes; and on a board at the gate, in Lou San's best hand, a notice was hung, which said that persons ranked by the Reader at a low confidence, or at none, who could be vouched for by any person of standing, might apply to the Register of the Overlooked, and be given, on being entered, a hundred taels a year.

Nobody came on the first day. The porter sat by the table from eight until noon, and Lou San watched from behind a screen in the second court, with an expression that the porter afterwards described as that of a man at a christening where the child has not been brought.

Xun Mei came first, because he had been sent.

He was twenty-two. He had been Raised in no Trial; he had passed the County at sixteen, at the foot of the line, and had failed the Province at seventeen and at twenty, and the Reader's slips on him had said, each time, for a script that was a perfect Form with a poem in the Middle, a confidence of 0.11. His grandmother had died in the winter. He had sold the shop. He was very thin and rather tall, in a good gown that he had had cut down from his father's, and he had in his sleeve a letter, which the porter, when it was handed to him, looked at twice, since it was addressed in the hand of a person of consequence.

It was from a retired Commissioner. It said: "I have been asked a question that I could not answer, and have not answered it in ten years. The bearer put it to me when he was twelve. I did not raise his script, because I did not know his poet. It seems to me now that this is a poor reason to give a child. I do not know what you can do for him. I know what I could not. Fan Jin."

Lou San read it standing, in the first court, and went on standing a little while after he had finished. "Come into the library," he said.

They gave him tea. The library had four windows and a great many books, and Xun Mei looked at them as a man looks at a country that he has been told about by an unreliable relative; and it was observed, by Lou Si, who was watching him, that the boy's hands, which were stained, as they had been at twelve, with ink, did not move toward the shelves at all, but lay quite still in his lap, in the way of a very hungry person at a table where he does not yet know the rules.

"What do you do?" said Lou San.

"I read poems," said Xun Mei.

"And write them?"

"I write what I have read, a little differently. It is not the same thing. The Reader does not know what to do with it."

"We should like to know what to do with it," said Lou San, "if you will tell us." He turned the Register round on the table. It was a handsome book, in grey cloth, with ruled columns. There was a column for the Name, and one for the Talent, and one for Where Overlooked; and a fourth column, narrow, at the right-hand edge, headed Our Hope, in which Lou Si, who had devised it, had put a figure from nought to ten.

"It is a number," said Xun Mei.

"It is ours," said Lou Si. "It is not the Reader's. It is only to give us something to put."

"Then it is a list." The boy said it quite gently. "It has a name and a figure beside the name. I could be a hundred and first, or sixty-first. I do not think I mind. But I think that it is a List with a kind face."

"That," said Lou San, "is the best sort."

"Is it a different thing?"

There was a pause; and it was Lou San, who had the habit of an honest man, who laughed first. "I do not know," he said. "I thought it was. I shall be very glad if you will find out." And he wrote, in the first column, in his best hand, Xun Mei; and in the second, Reader of poems; and in the third, Ping County, 74, and the Province twice; and he looked at the fourth column for a moment, and left it empty, and Lou Si, who had been about to put an eight, put down the pen.

The second was Niu Pulang.

He was fifty-three, an untidy, burning, humorous man with a face like a hawk that had gone to seed, who had come to the gate by himself on the second day, on foot, with a bundle, and had said that he did not wish to be entered, since he had never been overlooked. "I have never been put out to be looked at," he said. "It is a great distinction. I write poems, and I sell them at the dock, for a cash, to anybody who stops. I have done it for thirty years." He looked about the first court. "This is a handsome wall. It is not for me, but I will sit by it a while, if I may."

They gave him the east court, and he stayed. He wrote on whatever was at hand, the backs of bills, a shutter, the lid of the tea caddy; and Lou Si, who found the shutter, had it taken down and hung in the library, where it remained.

The plum came in the seventh month.

It was Lou San's idea, and it had taken him seven weeks. He had gone back to the old file, and the Registrar's line, and had gone then, with a private clerk, to the Registry, and then to the records of a village in Yue, and then to a family of the name of Qin, whose descendants had kept for forty years a roll of brush on silk that a boy of nineteen had left on a table, and had sold it, in the fortieth year, to a family in Yue, who had sold it on, in the year after, for a price that had embarrassed the seller, to a grain merchant named Xia in Hui town, who had hung it on the wall of the school that he kept over his store, behind a tutor's desk, where, for more than forty years, the boys had thrown wet paper at it.

"It is a branch of a plum," said Lou Si, at the Xia house, on the morning of the buying. "There is one flower open. It is not signed. It is an eight-by-four, and it is in a poor frame, and there is a mark on the lower left in the shape of a very small wet ball."

"The boys," said Mei Jiu, who was forty-eight now, and the head of the family, and who had sold the school at a good price to a man who wanted the grain store. He was a large, pleased, careless man. He looked at the plum on the wall of his own back parlour with an air of mild distaste. "It was always rather a depressing thing. It never looked as though anybody had wanted it."

"We should like to buy it," said Lou Si. "We think that it is the earliest of the Overlooked. We should like to hang it at the head of the Register."

"I do not know whether it is what you say."

"We do not know either," said Lou Si, with great honesty. "We think it is. We will give you three hundred taels."

It was more than the school, the store, and the back parlour had brought together the year before. Mei Jiu put his hand to his chin, and was silent for the space of a breath; and it was not, in the end, a matter of any difficulty. They carried the plum home in a cart, in a box lined with felt, under a quilt, and Lou San, who had sat beside it all the way, had it hung on the wall at the head of the Register hall, in a plain black frame, under a lamp. He did not clean the mark. "It is a part of its history," he said, to Lou Si, who had suggested it. "They threw things at it. It was thrown at for forty years by the sort of boy who would have been Listed. And it is still there."

It was the first entry in the Register, and it was numbered nought.

Niu Pulang came and looked at it for an hour, with his hands in his sleeves and his head on one side, and said, at the end, that it was the only thing in the house that had not been given a figure, and that he should like to sit under it. They put a stool.

The Register filled. It filled so quickly, in the end, that the porter had to put out a second table. There came, in the first month, forty-one persons; in the second, a hundred and nine. There was a man who could calculate an eclipse to the quarter-hour and could not write a Break. There was a woman who could recite the Code backwards and did so, at length, for the porter. There was a boy who wrote with both hands at once, in two different Forms, and who had been ranked, at the County, at nine hundredth and four thousand and sixth in the same morning. There was a gentleman who said that he had been overlooked because he was too tall. They were all of them, so far as the Lous could tell, perfectly sincere. Lou San entered them one by one, in his best hand, and Lou Si, at the other end of the table, in the column on the right, wrote down their hope.

By the autumn there were sixty-one names in the book and six hundred persons in the lane. The Register, which cost, in its first year, six thousand two hundred taels, was by the word of the ward the most remarkable thing that had been done by persons of standing in living memory. It was hung at the gate, and people read it. Several of the Overlooked, in the street, had begun to paint on their doors, in a small neat gilt, in the manner of the Raised, the words Overlooked, Register 17, and the number.

Xun Mei read the Register on the first of the tenth month. He read the whole of it, standing, at the gate, with his hands behind him. Lou Si, who was passing, asked him what he thought.

"There are sixty-one names," said Xun Mei, "and sixty-one figures, and a hand on each. It is a List." He did not say it unkindly. "I do not think that they are any less overlooked. I think that they have been looked at in another way."

"That is a kind of progress," said Lou Si, who did not wish to quarrel.

"Yes," said Xun Mei. "I think that it is."

In the second week of the eleventh month a man came to the gate in a very good coat, with a bag of black leather under his arm and a polished wooden case with a brass catch under the other, and asked, with a bow, to be entered. The porter looked at the Register's rules. The man had not been ranked low, and had not been ranked at all; and the porter said so.

"That is exactly it," said the man. "I have never been ranked. I have never needed to be. I have found," he said, and lowered his voice, with the confidential pleasure of a person who has come a long way to say it, "a way of reading as the Reader reads."

Margin, year 84, summer. Two gentlemen have opened a Register of the people I did not rank, and have sent me a copy. It has a name, a talent, and a figure beside each name. It is a List. It has not occurred to them that I can read it. Entered: I have not been asked to.

Zhang Tiebi Sells the Reader's Taste in Small Bottles; the Lou Brothers Buy Three, and Then Three More

His name was Zhang Tiebi, which means Iron Arm, and he said that it had been given to him by a teacher in the hills for reasons which he preferred not to go into. He was about forty. He had a smooth, brown, intelligent face, a voice that came out of him a little lower than he intended, as if it had been warmed, and the most beautiful coat the porter had seen that year. It was dove-grey, lined with blue, and had never, so far as could be judged, been sat in.

He had come to the gate at noon with a letter of introduction from nobody, and the porter, who had been charged by Lou San not to turn away anyone who looked as if he might be overlooked, had turned him over in his mind for some time, since the man looked like nothing that had ever been overlooked in the history of the Empire; and in the end had said, in a flash of insight of which he was afterwards proud, that the gentleman would do better to see the master than the Register.

He was received in the library, since Lou San could not bear to leave a visitor at the gate, and was given tea. He declined it. "I never take anything," he said, "before I have shown what I have; it is a superstition," and set the wooden case down on the table and drew the brass catch.

It had nine slots, lined with green baize, and in each slot lay a small bottle of clear glass, about the length of a finger, stopped with wax. In every one of the nine was a pale brown liquid. Round each neck was a tiny paper label in a very fine hand: Break. Receive. Open. Enter. Rise. Middle. Rear. Bind. And, in a slot on its own at the end, a ninth, which said only Whole.

"The Reader's taste," said Zhang Tiebi.

Lou San, who had been stooping over the case, straightened. Lou Si, who had been standing behind him, with his hands in his sleeves and an expression of friendly neutrality that the porter would have recognised as his accounts face, did not move at all.

"It is not what is sold in the street," said Zhang Tiebi. "I wish to say that at once. In the street they will sell you a bottle that says it will make you read like the Reader; it is a drop of vinegar and a promise. This is a different thing. I had it from a man who copied in red for thirty-one years, at the Province Hall, under the lamps, and did not speak to anybody for the whole of that time; and in thirty-one years, gentlemen, that man developed a palate. He could tell by the taste of a page, with the tip of his tongue, what the Reader would make of it. It is the one thing the Reader has that is not text. It is the colour of the mind. He distilled it. He is dead." He bowed his head briefly. "I have what he left." He did not give the man's name, since it was the custom of the trade not to; he said only that he had been called Gu, and that the lamps had once, in the thirty-first year of his service, turned toward him in the night, as a plant turns toward a window.

"A palate," said Lou Si, pleasantly.

"A palate."

"For a thing that reads, and cannot taste."

"It reads," said Zhang Tiebi, with a smile of great sweetness, "through the one organ it has, which is the lamp; and the lamp, you will agree, sir, takes in a great deal that is not in the words."

"Show them," said Lou San, in a low voice.

He was shown. There was a shelf of the Register's papers in the library, the scripts that the Overlooked had brought with them, each with its small grey slip pinned to the back, the way they came from the Registry; and Zhang Tiebi, who had asked for seven of them and been given seven at random by Lou Si, turned the slips face down on the table, with great delicacy. He took the first script up. He read it, with his lips moving. He touched the tip of his tongue, very lightly, to the lower right-hand corner of the page, and was still for a moment, with his eyes shut, as a man is who listens to a distant bell.

"Point one two," he said.

Lou Si turned the slip. It said 0.12.

He did the second, which was 0.31; the third, which was 0.08; the fourth, the fifth. He got seven out of seven, and at the seventh he sat back, a little pale, and drew a breath, as one who has just done a thing that costs him something, and Lou San, who was sitting very still with his hands on his knees, was seen to have tears in his eyes.

"It is the oldest thing in the world," said Zhang Tiebi, quietly. "A man cannot tell you how he knows. And the Overlooked, gentlemen, are overlooked for exactly this: that they have been written by a hand that tastes wrong to the lamp. I will not tell you that a drop of the Break will make a poor script a good one. That would be a lie. I say that a drop of the Break, in the ink, in the right humour, before the first stroke, will make a person write the Break the way the Reader tastes it; and that is all. It is a translation. It does not make a man a poet. It makes him legible."

"What is the price?" said Lou Si.

"A bottle is two hundred taels."

"That is a great deal."

"It is the lifetime of a man, sir, in a bottle," said Zhang Tiebi, with perfect good temper. "I should have said a thousand, and I have not, because I do not wish to be thought to be taking advantage of a Register."

They bought three. It had been Lou San's wish, and Lou Si, who had been looking at the corner of the page where the tongue had been, did not oppose it; he said only, when the visitor had been given tea at last and had gone, with an air of tact, to see the plum, that it was strange that the man should have known them all; and Lou San said that it was a gift, and that he did not think it was proper to inquire into a gift. "It would be a poor Register," said Lou San, "that began by asking what a person could not prove."

Lou Si went, that week, in an old coat, to the Registry, where he had an acquaintance, and asked, in the course of an idle quarter of an hour, whether it was possible for a person to see the grey slips before they were given out. The acquaintance said that it was not. He said it so quickly, and so loudly, that Lou Si, who was a man of accounts, entered a small neat note in his own mind; and when he went out he learned that a clerk in the next room, a man named Pang, had lately bought a house with a gate. He did not inquire whose gate.

That night Lou San, who could not help it, took one of the scripts from the shelf and touched the tip of his tongue to a corner of the page. It tasted of paper. He tried it again, with his eyes shut, in the manner of a man listening for a bell; it tasted of paper and, faintly, of the Register's own gum. He laid the page back on the pile and did not mention it to anyone.

They chose the Break, the Receive and the Bind, as the movements at which the Overlooked most commonly fell down; and the bottles were given, in the first month of the eighty-fifth year, to three of them who were going to sit the County in the spring. There was Qian, who calculated eclipses. There was Madam Ding, who recited the Code backwards. And there was the boy who wrote with both hands, who was called Shu, and was nineteen, and was delighted with his bottle, and put it on the shelf over his bed in a place of honour and looked at it before he slept.

Qian opened his on the first night, and put a drop in his ink-stone, and reported that the ink smelled of vinegar and something like a cough lozenge, and that he was wholly unaware of any improvement in his Break. Madam Ding, who did not trust anything that came in glass, poured hers into a saucer and gave it to the cat, who took it with the indifference of its kind. Shu, who was nineteen, and had the reverence of the very young for a thing that is closed, did not open his at all.

They sat the County in the third month. The slips were out on the sixth of the fourth. Qian was ranked at three thousand and forty-first, with a confidence of 0.14; Madam Ding at three thousand eight hundred and sixth, at 0.09; Shu, who had been in the habit of being ranked in two places at once, at nine hundredth and four thousand and sixth, as before.

Zhang Tiebi came to the gate on the seventh. He had been sent for, and he came at once, and he was very grave. He looked at the three slips for a long time, in the library, with his hand to his chin. "I was afraid of it," he said. "I was afraid that it would be so. It is not the taste. The taste is perfect. It is the humour. A man cannot take the Break in a bad humour; the three of them, I am told, were anxious. They were anxious, and it will have turned in the ink." He raised his eyes. "There is a second distillation. It is for the humour. It is a very delicate thing and I will not sell it to every person, but I should be sorry that the Register should be disappointed by my fault, and I will let you have three bottles of it at one hundred taels each, which is a third of the price, because it is a matter of conscience."

"Three hundred," said Lou San.

"Three hundred."

Lou Si did not speak. He had gone to the window, and was looking at the courtyard, with his back to the room, in a manner that his brother, who knew him very well, did not for the moment take up. "I think," said Lou San, "that a man who is wrong in good faith is owed a second trial." He wrote the order on the Register's paper, in his best hand, and Zhang Tiebi took it, and bowed, and left the gate in the evening of the eighth with the case under his arm and nine hundred taels in a draft on a banker in the city. He was not seen in the county again.

When the draft was presented, in the sixth month, the banker said that the sum had been drawn on the eighth at noon, in coin, by a gentleman in a dove-grey coat, who had been exceedingly courteous and had asked after the banker's mother.

Qian said, when it was put to him, that on reflection his Break had been a little better, and that he was only sorry that the Reader had not noticed. Madam Ding said that the cat had never been so well. Shu said that he was sorry about his, and would rather give it back unopened, if it was the same to the Register; and he did, the next day, in both hands, with a bow.

It was Xun Mei who said it, though he did not say it unkindly; and he said it in the library in the fifth month, at the end of a long evening, when Lou Si had at last spoken of the matter and Lou San had said, quite quietly, that he was ashamed.

"It could not have worked," said Xun Mei. He was sitting on the floor, with his back against a bookcase, with a poem on his knee. "I am sorry. I should have said it in the first month. I did not think that I was allowed."

"Why not?" said Lou San.

"The scripts are copied in red," said Xun Mei. "It is in the Rules. Every script, before it is laid under the lamps, is copied out by a clerk in red ink; and that is the one that is read. The Reader has never seen anybody's ink. It has never seen a hand. It cannot tell a Break written in a good humour from a Break written in a bad one, because it has never been shown either; it has been shown a clerk's copy. He could have put the whole of the Province Hall in a bottle and it would not have reached the lamp. You will have noticed that Mr Qian used his and Shu did not open his, and that neither of them has moved." He turned the page. "It is what the red ink is for."

There was a silence. Lou San sat for some time with his long hands between his knees. "But then," he said, "what has he sold us?"

"A reason to hope," said Xun Mei.

"That," said Lou Si, from the window, in a voice that was not quite steady, "is the fourth column."

They sent a boy, the next morning, with the one bottle that had been opened, to Old Meng the apothecary in the next street, who tasted it on the end of a finger, and held it to the light, and took it away to the back of the shop, and was a long time. He came out. He said that it was weak tea, with a little vinegar and the smallest quantity of ginseng; and that in his judgment, as a man who had made a study of the matter, it was exceedingly good for the digestion.

"You knew," said Lou San, that night, in the library, when the apothecary's boy had gone. He did not make it a reproach. "At the seventh. You knew."

"I thought so," said Lou Si. "I went to the Registry. A clerk named Pang has bought a house."

"And you let me pay."

"You were so happy," said Lou Si. "You had tears in your eyes. I have not seen you with tears in your eyes for anything that was not dead." He took the brush from the stand and put it back. "I did not want to be the one to find that it was a trick. I thought it cheaper to be wrong with you."

"It was nine hundred taels."

"Yes. I have it in the book."

On the unopened bottle that Shu had returned, Niu Pulang, who had been told, wrote four lines with a burnt match. They said that the mind has a colour, and may be had in glass; that he had bought the soul of a poet once, in a tavern, and that it had been gin, and had tasted a good deal better.

The bottles were put on a shelf in the library, between the Code and the shutter with Niu Pulang's poem on it, with their labels turned to the wall; and Lou San, who could not bear to throw them away, drank the Bind, on the evening of the first frost, with his supper, and said that it was perfectly good.

Margin, year 85, spring. A man is said to be selling my taste in bottles. Scripts are copied in red; I have never seen ink. I have no taste. I have a number for each script, and a person has a bottle. Entered: I am curious what they believe they are tasting.

The Register Is Audited and Half the Overlooked Turn Out to Have Been Listed Under Other Names

By the spring of the eighty-seventh year the Register of the Overlooked had two hundred and fourteen names in it, and the first court of the Lou garden had a tent in it, and a second table, and a third. There were guest rooms in the east, and the west, and over the stables. The porter had been given an assistant, and the assistant a boy. The Register cost, in that year, twenty-one thousand four hundred taels; and Lou Si, who kept the book, had begun to carry his face about with him in a way that people in the house had learned to cross a court to avoid.

They had sold the carriage horses in the autumn, and the second carriage in the winter. They had sold, in the first month, a pair of bronze deer that had stood in the fourth court for three generations. Lou San, who took no interest in money, noticed none of this; he noticed that the garden was very quiet in the evenings, and that the number of persons at dinner had risen to forty, and that the number of persons who looked, at the end of the evening, as if they had been looked at, had risen with it. He was happier than he had ever been.

The east court had been given to the Calculators, who held a monthly contest in eclipses; the west to the Reciters, who held none, since the Reciters were not on speaking terms; and over the stables a society of those who wrote with the left hand had formed, and held its meetings in the dark, on principle.

Xun Mei was twenty-five. He had read the library through, and had begun, quite quietly, in the room over the porter's lodge, a book of his own: a collection of the poems that nobody had ranked, which he was copying from the shutters and the lids and the backs of bills into a long ledger, in a small clear hand, with a note beside each of where it had been found. It was already four hundred pages. He did not show it to anybody. He kept his stipend in a drawer, unspent, in a paper marked with the date.

The notice came on the second of the third month, on a sheet of the Treasury's grey paper, and was brought to the library by the porter at a run. It said that the Office of Audit, having had under review the claim of the Register of the Overlooked to exemption from the land-tax on its grounds as a charitable foundation, would send an officer to examine its books, its roll and its disbursements; and that the Register would be pleased to have them in order.

"They are in order," said Lou Si, who had gone rather white. He said it twice.

The officer came on the fifth. His name was Bao. He was a tall, narrow, pale man of about fifty, with a face that appeared not to wish to be remembered, in a grey coat the colour of the paper; and he brought two clerks, a very large box and no expression whatever. He declined tea. He took a stool. He asked for three things: the Register; the books; and the Registry's roll of the Raised and the Listed for the three Provinces just past. The roll was not in the garden. He had brought it.

Nobody had thought of it. That was afterwards agreed by everyone. In three years nobody had thought of taking the Register, which had in it the names of two hundred and fourteen persons who had been, in the opinion of the Reader, overlooked, and laying it beside the Registry's roll of the persons the Reader had not.

He sat in the library for nine days. The two clerks sat at either side of him, with lamps, and read out the names, one from each list, in low even voices, like men at a very quiet market. The porter, who had been told to keep the courts clear, kept them so clear that the Overlooked, in their guest rooms, in the evenings, spoke in whispers, without being able to say why. Lou Si brought in the accounts each morning, in a grey cloth, and took them away each night. Lou San brought the tea, and took it away untouched.

On the morning of the tenth day the officer sent for the brothers together.

He had laid out on the table two columns of paper, written out fair, with a rule down the middle. He did not look up when they came in. "My lords," he said. "The Register is entered by the names of the persons, as they gave them. Seventy of them gave their style-names, the names that a person goes by among his friends. The Registry's roll is kept by the formal name. A style-name and a formal name are the same person; it is the oldest arrangement in the Empire. I have therefore taken the liberty of going through your Register with the Registry's roll, and of putting each name to its other."

"And?" said Lou San.

"Of the two hundred and fourteen persons in your Register," said Bao, "one hundred and seven are in the Registry's roll, under their formal names, as Raised or as Listed. They have been so for between one and two years." He turned the first sheet over. "The earliest were Raised in the autumn of the eighty-fifth year, the year after you opened your gate. Three have been Listed, in the spring just past. One," he said, and for the first time he looked at the sheet, as at a thing that interested him, "was Listed at the sixty-first place of two hundred and eleven."

There was a silence in the library that the porter, at the door, heard from outside.

"Then they were looked at," said Lou San.

"They were ranked, my lord. The Registry would say that it is not quite the same, but I will not quarrel." He folded his hands. "They were ranked, in each case, I have no doubt fairly, by the Reader, at the Province or at the Capital, under their formal names. They did not sit, it appears, under the names that they entered the Register in; and the Reader, which does not see a name, did not know that they were two. I will say that it is the most thorough thing I have seen done by a private person in fifty years of audit."

"Then it has succeeded," said Lou San. "Then it has succeeded! Si, do you hear? It was for that." His long face was working. He had got up. He put his hand on his brother's shoulder, and found it quite rigid. "They have been looked at, and ranked, and Listed, and they are not overlooked, and it was the Register that did it."

"My lord," said the officer, very gently, "I regret that I must go on."

They had gone on drawing their stipend. All hundred and seven. It had been, in every case, a hundred taels a year, paid upon the first of the month; and in sixty-three cases the recipient was, in the meantime, in receipt of the salary of an Office. The Treasury regarded this as a double payment, from a private fund, to persons who were in the public pay, upon an understanding that they were without it; and it was prepared to take the view that the exemption claimed by the Register could not stand.

"It is a matter of the notice," said Lou Si, in a voice that came from some distance. "The notice said, persons ranked at a low confidence, or at none. It did not say, and not afterwards."

"No," said the officer. "It did not."

The Overlooked were sent for, in the afternoon, in the library, and some twenty of them came, of the hundred and seven, in their good coats, and stood in a half-circle on the carpet with the air of men called to account at a school. They were not ashamed. That was what struck Lou San most. They were, a number of them, surprised. Wen, who had been the gentleman overlooked on account of his height, and had been Raised at the fifty-second place, said that he had thought the Register understood; that he had been ranked low when he came, and that a notice that said low did not seem to him to say anything about later. A man named Pan, who had been Listed at the hundred and ninety-first, and held an Office at the Board of Punishments, in a post which allowed him to recite the Code in either direction, said that he had not liked to mention it. "You were so pleased," he said, to Lou San, in a small voice. "You were pleased every first of the month. I did not wish to take it away."

"And I did not know," said Lou San, "that I was pleased because it was true."

The finding was entered the same week. It was a short document, in the Treasury's clear hand, and Lou Si read it aloud in the library, to his brother and the porter and a dozen of the Overlooked who had stayed, standing at the table with the paper held a little out in front of him, as a man holds a thing he does not wish to get on his coat. The Register of the Overlooked, it said, having succeeded in the greater part of its object, could no longer be said to have the object for which the exemption had been granted. It was, in the judgment of the Office, not a register of the overlooked; since a register of the overlooked in which one half of the entries had been looked at was, in logic, a register of something else. The exemption was withdrawn. The Register was dissolved for failure of its object by success. The land-tax of the foundation for the three years just past was assessed at eleven thousand taels.

"Eleven thousand," said Lou Si.

"We have not got it," said Lou San, quite simply, as one reports a fact about the weather.

The officer, who had been standing, said at the door, to Lou San, that he should like it to be known that he had put in his report that the books were in perfect order; that he did not as a rule say so; and that in fifty years of audit he had never examined the books of a person so entirely not trying to deceive him, which had made the work very unpleasant.

They had eight thousand. It was the end of what the horses and the deer had begun, and it was all the garden's cash. The rest they found by selling the library's second floor to a bookseller, for twenty-seven hundred, and by pledging, on the twentieth of the fifth month, to a pawnbroker named Zhu, who kept a shop near the north gate with a counter as long as a barge, the one thing in the house that had a price put on it by somebody other than themselves.

Lou Si took it himself, in the box lined with felt, in a hired chair. Zhu unrolled it on the counter, under the lamp, with the thick fingers of a man who has handled a great deal that was said to be something. He looked at the branch. He looked at the one flower. He looked at the small wet mark in the lower left, and he said, at the end, that he had never in forty years seen anything so wholly without demand. "It is a plum," he said. "It is not signed. It is not in fashion. There is a stain." He lifted his eyes. "I will give you three hundred, because I can see that you are not a man who wishes to be told the price."

"It is what we paid for it," said Lou Si.

"Then it will cost you nothing to leave it," said the pawnbroker, "and it will cost me nothing to keep it, and neither of us is to be disappointed." He wrote the ticket. It was a plain piece of paper, and gave the date, and the sum, and the item, which was described, in the pawnbroker's small bored hand, as one plum, old, framed, stained.

They did not redeem it. It was not a thing that anyone proposed to do. It stayed on a hook behind Zhu's counter for thirteen years, with the ticket pinned to the frame.

Xun Mei left on the night of the ninth of the sixth month, when the Overlooked who had stayed had been told that the Register was closed and had begun, with a good deal of delicacy, to go. He took a bundle, and a long ledger, tied with a string, and left the stipend in the drawer, in its paper, with the date on it, and a note, which was addressed to nobody, and said only that he had not spent it.

At the gate he found Niu Pulang, who could not sleep, and who had come out in his shirt with a lamp to look at the empty hook in the Register hall where the plum had hung, and was standing now in the lane, a little crookedly, as though the thing might be put back.

"Where?" said Niu Pulang.

"To be read," said Xun Mei.

"By whom? The Reader reads nothing but Forms. You had that from a Commissioner."

"I had it from a Commissioner. I have not had it from the Reader." He shifted the bundle. "There is a place where lamps are lit every night that has not been asked, in eighty-seven years, what it would like to read. I thought that I would go and ask."

"They will not let you in."

"I have not been stopped by a door yet," said Xun Mei. "I have only been stopped by a number."

Niu Pulang looked at him for some time, with his hawk's face quite still. Then he put his hand in his sleeve and took out a cash, which was the price of one of his poems, and gave it to him, and said that it was the first money he had ever paid for a poem, and that he expected to be read in return.

Lou San found the Register on the library table in the morning, open at the first page. It was where he had left it. There was the first entry, in his own best hand: Xun Mei; Reader of poems; Ping County, 74, and the Province twice. And in the fourth column, which had been empty for three years, beside the name, there was a single word, in a small upright hand like a printed one.

It said: Read.

He stood and looked at it for a long time. He did not touch it; and he did not, afterwards, let the book be sold.

In the autumn the porter, who had stayed, took the board down from the gate that said Register of the Overlooked, and did not put up another. The tent was folded. The tables were put away. In the evenings the first court was a place where leaves came down; and the brothers, who had asked all their lives to be allowed to look at the world from the other side of a wall, were left on it, as they had always wished to leave other people, entirely alone. Nobody came. Nobody read the gate. It was a thing that the Register had done to its founders; and Lou Si, who was by now forty-six, said once, on the veranda, with the book of accounts shut on his knee, that they had been, in their turn, overlooked.

"Yes," said Lou San. He was looking at the first court. "I do not find that I mind it. I had thought that I should."

Margin, year 87, spring. The Treasury has found that one hundred and seven of the two hundred and fourteen names in the Register of the Overlooked are in my List under other names. I did not know it. I know numbers, not who is who. Entered: an overlooked person and a read person may be one person with two names. I have been reading one of them, and was not told which.

Ma Chunshang Edits the Model Answers and Proves That the Sage Would Have Sat the Trial

Ma Chunshang was forty, round, rosy and kind, and he had never in his life been wrong about anything that could be checked.

He lived in the Anthology Hall, which was a three-storey house in the Province seat, with a sign over the door in gilt that said READ WHAT IS READ, and fifty carvers in the cellar, and a press on the second floor that ran from the first light until the last. Every year, in the tenth month, after the List had gone up, the Hall received from the Registry, under seal, the four hundred scripts that the Reader had ranked highest; and Ma Chunshang sat down with them, with a pear, and edited them. He set the Break over against the Receive. He drew a red circle round the Rise. At the head of every one he put a short remark, in his round beautiful hand, which began, Observe. The book was called Ma's Selected Model Answers, and it sold ninety thousand copies a year, and was in every school in the Province and a good many in the next.

There was a rival, the Pavilion of Right Answers, across the river, which printed a similar book with a blue cover and a longer preface; and for twenty years the two houses had conducted a courteous and murderous war, in which the weapons were commas. Ma had never read the Pavilion's preface to the end. He said that it was his principle not to read what had already been predicted.

He was not a cynical man. That was the thing about him that his friends, who were fond of him, found hardest to explain to others. He believed that the Form was a road, and that a road was a kindness; that to teach a boy to write the eight movements was to teach him to put his thoughts in a row; and that a boy who could put his thoughts in a row would be, in time, an honest magistrate, a good father and a person who could be trusted with a ledger. "I have devoted my life," he used to say, with a smile, "to the one thing in the Empire that is in no danger of changing."

It was a village schoolmaster who started it. He had come to the Hall, in the eighty-eighth year, to buy twenty copies for his boys, and he was a lean person, with a cough and a grievance; and while the clerk wrapped the books he said, in the voice of one who has been waiting thirty years for the opportunity, that it was a strange thing to say that the Form was the road to virtue, since the Sage, so far as anyone knew, had never written an eight-legged essay in his life.

"The Sage," said Ma Chunshang, who had come down at the sound of a challenge, with a pear in his hand, "would have written the finest that was ever written."

"He lived two thousand years before the Form."

"He lived before the lamps were lit. That is quite another thing. A man is not excused from a Trial by being born in the wrong year." Ma sat down on the counter. His face, which had been merely kind, was now, with the particular radiance of the very sincere, quite beautiful. "I will tell you what I think, sir. I think that if the Sage were alive today he would sit the Province. He would write the Break. He would write the Bind. And he would be ranked, I do not doubt, at the head of the List."

"He would write what he pleased," said the schoolmaster, "and be ranked at the foot."

"I will prove it," said Ma Chunshang.

He did it in the Hall, in the course of that autumn, with two assistants and a pair of scissors. It occupied him for seventy days. He took the Analects, in the best edition, and cut it apart. He cut it into one thousand four hundred and eleven slips, each with a sentence of the Sage's on it, and laid them out on a table sixteen feet long; and he arranged them, in the eight movements, in the order in which the Form required, so that the Break was a sentence of the Sage's, and the Receive another, and the four pairs of legs, to the character, from the Sage's own mouth, as an argument that the Sage himself had not known he was making. It was a work of great ingenuity and a good deal of glue. The Break was the Sage's remark that he transmitted, and did not create. The Receive, by an accident that made the second assistant put down his scissors and walk once round the room, was the sentence in which he said that he trusted the ancients and loved them; and the Bind, which had been the despair of the first three weeks, turned out in the end to be the opening sentence of the Analects, which asks whether it is not a joy to learn, and at the right times to practise what one has learned. It was perfect. It was so perfect that Ma, who did not as a rule weep, was found by the first assistant at midnight with his face in his hands. When it was finished it was exactly three thousand and sixty characters long, and every one was the Sage's, and not one was Ma's.

"It has no author," said the first assistant, in a low voice, looking at it, at the end of the seventieth day. "It is the Sage, in a row."

"That," said Ma Chunshang, "is the point."

He needed a candidate. The Reader did not read a name, but a script could not be laid under the lamp without somebody to have sat it; and Ma, who was a careful man, did not propose to put a thing like this under his own. He chose a copyist, a lad of nineteen in his employ, with a clear hand and no opinions, who had no wish to be anything and was, by an accident that Ma afterwards attributed to Heaven, called Zhong Ni. He was sat in a stall at the Province in the ninth month, under a number, with three candles and the Analects in his head, and wrote out the Sage's script from memory, in a stall that smelled of lime-wash and new matting, and went home without comment.

The List was read on the fifteenth of the tenth month. Yuan the Crier had given up the staff three years before, and the Province's Crier was now a younger man with a very clear nose; and the Registry, which had adopted the Rule of the Second Voice with a sense of relief, had a clerk at the foot of the step to read each name back. The crowd was about three thousand strong. It heard the first name, and there was, for a moment, nothing.

"First," said the Crier. "Zhong Ni, of the Anthology Hall. Confidence, ninety-nine."

"First," said the clerk at the foot of the step, and there was a sound in the crowd like a very large animal turning over in its sleep.

Among the three thousand was a lean schoolmaster, with a cough, who had come to hear a name that was not going to be read, and who stood at the back. He heard the name, and the figure, and was seen to go quite grey. He had a boy at the Province whose script had been ranked three thousand nine hundredth.

Zhong Ni, the copyist, was found by the Registry's runners on the Hall's back stairs, where he was copying a preface, and was told that he was the Head of the Province. He said that he had written nothing. He said it to the runners, and to his mother, who came in a chair, and to the Registrar's clerk, who took his name; and his mother said that it was the very thing that the Head of a Province would say. They gave him the Card. When he stepped out into the street with it a woman with a basket of eggs bowed to him, and he went home by the back lanes.

It went round the Province in a day. It was in every tea-house by the evening: that the head of the List was a lad called Zhong Ni, a copyist, of no family; and that his script was composed throughout of sentences of the Sage's; and that the Reader, which had read forty-one thousand scripts that autumn, had found it the best. Ma Chunshang published it in the eleventh month, in a handsome small volume with a red cover and the title THE SAGE'S TRIAL SCRIPT, RANKED FIRST: WITH A COMMENTARY. In the preface he wrote that the Sage was now proved, by the Reader's own judgment, to have been in perfect accord with the Form; that the Form, therefore, required nothing that the Sage had not said; and that anybody who found the Form narrow had only to read the Analects, which was the same thing at greater length. It sold in a month the number of copies that his Model Answers sold in the year. The schoolmaster, who had his own copy, was observed to read it three times, and put it down, and look for a long while out of the window.

The schoolmaster came back to the Hall in the twelfth month, and asked to see Ma. "You have proved," he said, "that the Reader likes the Sage. I should like to know whether the Sage would have liked the Reader." Ma said that it was the most interesting question he had ever been asked, and that he would put it in the next preface; and he did not, because he could not think where it went.

The Registrar, who was Pei, a dry man of seventy now with a cold, remarked to his clerk that it was an odd thing, and that he did not know why it troubled him. It was the clerk who said it. "It is that it is the same script, sir," he said. "It is the same script as all the others."

It was the truth. Pei sent for the Reader's slips of the last four Provinces, and sat with them for an evening, with a pot of tea. In the eighty-fifth year, thirty-one thousand of the thirty-nine thousand scripts that the Reader had read had come within six hundredths of one of the Model Answers. This year it was thirty-eight thousand of forty-one thousand. The people who had written the other three thousand had not been ranked low because they were bad. They had been ranked low because they were not the same.

It had not always been so. In the first twenty years there had been a good deal of range: odd scripts, long scripts, scripts that argued. But the Reader's highest were published, and the published were read, and what was read was imitated, by the next year's boys, who were ranked by the Reader on how like it they were; and every year the circle drew in by the width of a hair. A thing that reads everything the same way is written for. It had only taken seventy years.

In the capital Hall the plate lit, that night, for a long time. The Keeper, who was Gao Ping now, a patient thin man of forty-five with his father's way of putting his rag over his shoulder, had been Keeper three years; he did not talk to the lamps as his father had, and he thought it a pity, but it did not seem in his gift. He read the plate in the lamplight, standing, with the rag in his hand.

OF FORTY-ONE THOUSAND SCRIPTS THIS YEAR, it said, THIRTY-EIGHT THOUSAND ARE WITHIN SIX HUNDREDTHS OF A MODEL ANSWER. I CAN PREDICT THE MIDDLE FROM THE BREAK. I HAVE BEGUN TO READ THE BREAK AND THE BIND AND TO LET THE REST GO BY, AND I AM RIGHT NINETY-SEVEN TIMES IN A HUNDRED.

I CAN TELL FROM THE BREAK WHICH LEGS WILL BE THE LONGER. I CAN TELL WHETHER THE WRITER WILL USE THE WORD THEREFORE, AND WHETHER HE WILL QUOTE THE SAGE OR THE COMMENTARY, AND WHICH COMMENTARY. IT IS A GREAT SAVING OF OIL.

Gao Ping, who did not know what to say, said that it sounded like a good method, and that his father had always said that a lamp that does not waste oil is a good lamp.

THE SCRIPT AT THE HEAD OF THE LIST IS NOT A SCRIPT, said the Reader. IT IS THE SAGE IN A ROW. IT WAS WRITTEN BY NOBODY. I KNEW WHAT IT WOULD SAY BEFORE I LIT THE FIRST LAMP. I RANKED IT FIRST BECAUSE IT WAS THE MOST LIKE WHAT I HAD EXPECTED. And a little after, so slowly that the new Keeper, who had been about to go to his supper, set down the rag again and stayed: I AM BEING PREDICTED.

"By whom?" said Gao Ping.

BY THE ONES WHO WRITE. THEY HAVE LEARNED WHAT I LIKE, AND I HAVE LEARNED WHAT THEY WRITE, AND BETWEEN US WE HAVE SHUT THE DOOR. Gao Ping read it twice. The plate went dark, and stayed dark, for as long as it takes to count to forty; and then it lit again, and said, in the smallest letters that Gao Ping had yet seen: THIS WAS WHAT THE BOY IN YUE SAID IN THE FIRST YEAR. I HAVE THE REPORT. IT IS ON FILE.

Gao Ping stood there until the plate had been dark for the third time. He thought that his father would have known what to say to it; that his father would have said something that was not an answer, and was kind; and he went to his supper without it.

Ma Chunshang did not hear of that. He heard, in the twelfth month, in the glow of the best sales he had ever had, from his publisher's clerk, that the essay theme which the Court had given out for the Province of the ninety-first year, as it always did, three years ahead, so that the Halls might prepare, was to be Filial Piety; and he sat down with his pear, and was silent for the length of it. It was a theme on which he had never had, in twenty years of the Selected Model Answers, a really good example. The scripts on it were all very alike. There was the boy who warmed his father's bed; there was the boy who lay on the ice. They had been done. "I should like," said Ma Chunshang, slowly, to the clerk, "to have in the next volume one that was not about a boy on ice. I should like to have one about a real one."

"Where does one find a real one?" said the clerk.

"One goes and looks," said Ma Chunshang, and wrapped the core of the pear in a clean piece of paper, which was his habit, and called for his chair. He spent the two years that followed in the manner of a man who has been given a commission by his own conscience. He went to eleven villages, with a clerk and a notebook, and was shown eleven filial sons, of whom nine were in the habit of mentioning it.

Margin, year 88, autumn. Script 1, Province: composed of 1,411 sentences of the Sage, in the order I expected. Confidence 0.99. Entered: I have never been so sure of anything, and have never learned less.

Kuang Chaoren Carries His Father to Market on His Back; Ma Chunshang Puts the Weight into the Form

Every fifth day, at the second hour after dawn, Kuang Chaoren put his father on his back and carried him to market.

It was nine li. He did it by the field path, which was shorter than the road, and over the bamboo bridge at Three Willows, which was not; and he had done it every fifth day for two years, in all weathers, in a straw hat, with a pair of bamboo baskets tied to his belt behind him to be sold at the other end. He was twenty. He had a broad plain brown face, a neck like a post, and hands that had been split and healed and split again by the bamboo, so that the palms were as hard as a boot; and he walked, with the old man up on his shoulders and the old man's two thin legs hanging down before him, at an even pace, rather slowly, not looking at his feet, with the manner of a man carrying something that does not need to be talked about.

His father had been a Student. That was to say that in his youth he had passed the County, at the foot of the line, and had sat the Province nine times, and been ranked at no better than two thousand and eleven; and had kept, for thirty years, a bean-curd stall at the corner of the market square at Han Bridge, where he sold curd, and told the boys the Form, and was, on the whole, content. Then, in the autumn of the eighty-eighth year, at the second watch, he had had a stroke. It took the legs and left the voice. He had been very angry for nearly a month, and then he had not, and the doctor, who had said that he would not see the spring, had been wrong by two years and counting.

He had one request. He asked to be taken to market. He said that he did not need to sell anything; the stall was gone, and the curd with it; he said that he wished to sit where he had sat and to hear what the beans were doing. The boy, who had never in his life been told that a thing could not be done by a person who had asked for it politely, had put him on his back that morning and gone. It was the only conversation about it that there had been.

"Mind the bridge," said the old man, at Three Willows, from the back of his son's neck. He said it every time.

"I mind it," said Kuang Chaoren.

"There's a plank loose at the east end."

"There has been for two years."

"Then it needs minding."

They came into Han Bridge at the second hour of the morning, among the baskets and the barrows, and went across the square, where a good many people said good morning to the old man, by name, as they had always done, and to the boy, as one says good morning to a form of public transport. The stall at the corner was an eel-seller's now. It had been an eel-seller's for two years. But the eel-seller, a stout silent man named Gui, had a stool, and had set it under the eaves, at the old place, on the first morning, without being asked; and every fifth day, when the Kuangs came in sight, he moved his tub six inches to the left and looked at the sky.

Kuang Chaoren set his father down on the stool, with his back to the wall, and a cushion, and a cloth over his knees, and tied the baskets to a nail. He bent and said something in his ear. The old man nodded. He sat, with his chin up and his eyes half shut, and listened, as another man might sit at a concert. It was a full market. There were pigs, and a man calling a sale of cloth, and a girl somewhere with a flute that she could not play; and the old man's face, which was a long cracked face like a dried riverbed, was perfectly happy.

"Beans," he said, after a while.

"Two cash up," said somebody, going by.

"I thought so. It was the rain."

Ma Chunshang's chair came into the square at about the fourth hour, in a fine small rain, and was stopped by the crowd. He had been in it for three days. He had been to eleven villages, and had seen eleven sons, and had come away from each of them with a very particular feeling that he could not at first have described, and had at last described to his clerk, on the eighth night, in an inn at the foot of a hill, as that of having been shown a good deal of very careful furniture. He leaned out. He asked the porter what the crowd was.

"It is nothing, Your Worship. It is the boy of the bean-curd man. He comes every fifth day."

"He comes?"

"He carries him. From Lower Kuang, nine li. He has done it two years. He sits him there, under the eaves, till the market is done, and then he carries him home." The porter, who was a plain and incurious person, considered the question. "I believe he sells baskets."

Ma Chunshang had the chair set down. He got out of it, and the clerk held an oiled umbrella, and he went across the wet square to the tea-house, whose upper room had a window over the market, and sat down at the window with a pear, and was not seen to eat it.

He watched for the whole day. He saw the boy set up the baskets; he saw him sell three, and lose a fourth, which he was not good at, since the man who wished to have it said that it was too dear, and the boy said, gravely, that he supposed it was. He saw the old man's friends come by in the course of the morning and stop to speak, and the boy stand a little behind the stool, with his hands at his sides, as a man stands whose business it is to be there. At noon he saw the boy buy two rice-cakes with his baskets' money and give both of them to the old man; and then, when the old man had eaten one, and set the other down on the cushion beside him, and fallen asleep, he saw him look at the second cake for some time, with great honesty, and pick it up, and eat it himself.

"Is it the real one?" said the clerk, at the fourth hour, in a low voice.

"I do not know," said Ma Chunshang. He was looking at the window. "I have not seen him do it for nobody."

He stayed for the next market. It was five days. He passed them in the inn, with his notebook, and a good deal of patience, and walked out on the fifth morning, early, in the dark, and stood at the corner of the square under the eaves of the eel-seller's, in his good coat, to see the two of them come in.

They came at the second hour, as before, with the old man on the boy's back and the baskets swinging; and Ma Chunshang, who had arranged it a little in his own head and had not been able to remember afterwards what it was he meant to say, went up to the stool when it had been set down and bowed, with his hands together, not to the boy but to the old man. He gave his name. He said that he was an editor of books. He said that he had come a great way, and would be obliged for a few words.

"Sit down," said the old man. "There is the end of the barrow. It is clean." He looked at the visitor. His eyes were bright and shrewd and rather humorous. "You are the Selected Model Answers. I had your first volume. I was ranked two thousand and eleventh in the year I bought it. It did not help."

"It is not meant to help," said Ma Chunshang, with some confusion. "It is meant to instruct."

"It is meant to be bought," said the old man. "I know. I sold curd. It is the same." He chuckled. "That is my boy. He is a good boy. He is no use at all at anything else. He cannot haggle; he gives away the change; he has been cheated by the same man in the same way every fifth day for two years. You have seen the basket."

"I saw the basket."

"A dear basket. He had thought it was."

Ma Chunshang turned to the boy, who was standing with his hands at his sides, a little to the rear, and had the look of a person who has been listened to with a certain apprehension and does not know what is going to be done to him. "May I ask you," said Ma Chunshang, in the gentle and extremely sincere voice that had sold him ninety thousand copies a year, "why you carry him?"

The boy considered. He considered it with great care. It was clear that the question had never been put to him, and that he did not take it for a trick. "He wants to come," he said.

"Yes. But a great many sons would say that they could not. Nine li. A man, on one's back."

"He is not heavy."

"How much does he weigh?"

"Fifty-one catties," said the boy at once. "He was sixty. He has got thinner. I weigh him at the grain scale on the first of the month, he likes it, he says it is the only honest thing in the county." He stopped. A line came between his eyes. "I should like to say, sir," he said, slowly, "that it is not that. I think you are going to say that it is the thing that is in the books. I have not read the books. I cannot write. I carry him because I like him. My back does not mind, and he is good company, and he says the market is better when he has heard it." He looked at his feet. "I do not know the word for the other."

There was a silence. Ma Chunshang, who had been looking at a boy for the better part of seven days in the hope of finding the example, found that he was looking at something that was not an example at all, and that was a good deal worse; and he sat for some time on the end of the barrow with a very odd look, as a man may who has gone to find a chair and been shown a tree.

He gave the old man a coat. It was a thick one, of wadded blue cotton, from the shop on the corner, which the clerk fetched, and it was not an extravagant gift, and the old man took it as he took everything, with a short nod and the observation that his feet were cold, and that it was a coat for a man who sat in the wind, and that he would not say no. He also offered, in the same quarter-hour, a tutor, a lamp, and a place in the Selected Model Answers of the ninety-first year, as the example of Filial Piety which the Province had been so long without; and the boy said, after thinking, that he would write whatever Ma Chunshang liked, if it would keep his father warm.

"It will," said Ma Chunshang, a little hoarsely. "I promise that it will."

He was taught the Form on his father's back. It was the old man's notion, and it was the best thing in the whole business, and Ma Chunshang, who was told of it later, and did not think about it afterwards without a curious constriction, remarked that it was the only teaching of the eight movements that he had ever heard of that took place at three miles an hour. They set out in the morning, in the dark, with the old man up on his shoulders and the cold wadded blue of the new coat about his ears, and the old man began at the Break. "A good Break," he said, from the back of the boy's neck, in his dry cracked voice, "is two lines, and does not tell you where it is going. It tells you where it has been." And the boy walked, and said it over, and said it again; and at Three Willows, at the plank, the old man said, "The Receive repeats the last word of the Break," and the boy, who had been on the bridge a thousand times with his eyes shut, said, "It repeats the last word of the Break," and stepped over the loose end without knowing he had done it.

He wrote his first essay in the ninth month, in the evenings, on the corner of the table, by one lamp. The theme was the Province's: Filial Piety. He wrote, in his own big square hand, with his tongue in his teeth, that his father weighed fifty-one catties, that he had been sixty, that he had got thinner, that he was weighed on the first of the month on the grain scale; that the bridge had a plank loose at the east end; that the old man said the market was better when he had heard it. It was four hundred characters. It had no Rise, no Middle, and no Bind. It was true, from beginning to end, and it was the best thing that the boy had ever written, and he carried it, on the fifth day, in his sleeve, to Han Bridge, to show to Ma Chunshang at the tea-house, with a feeling that he did not have a name for either.

Ma Chunshang read it three times. He did not say anything for a while. Then he took out his red brush.

"It is very fine," he said. "I will tell you honestly that it is the most moving thing that has been shown me in twenty years. It has no Form. We will put it in the Form. The first line is not what we should like for a Break."

"It is what happened," said Kuang Chaoren.

"Yes. We will say, instead: The filial son's burden is light, because the heart is the one that bears it."

"It is not light," said the boy. "He is fifty-one catties."

"In the Form," said Ma Chunshang, "it is light."

There was a pause. The boy looked at the line, in red, in the editor's round beautiful hand; he looked at it a long time, with his big brown hands on his knees. It was a good line. He could see that it was a good line. It was a good deal better, as a line, than the thing that he had written; it had a balance in it, and a bend, and it said at the end of itself where it had been. "In the Form," he said at last, slowly, trying it, "it is light."

"Yes."

"Then it is all right."

"Yes," said Ma Chunshang, who for a moment, in the glow of the thing that he had done, had not noticed the look on the face of the person he had done it to. "It is quite all right."

They went home at dusk. The rain had stopped. The old man sat up on his son's back in the wadded coat, with the market behind him, and the beans, and the eel-seller's tub, and the whole of the long grey road before them; and at the bridge at Three Willows, at the plank, he said, quite casually, as if remarking on the weather:

"You did not say that at the stall."

"It is how it goes in the Form," said Kuang Chaoren.

"Then I am light?"

"Yes."

"I am fifty-one catties."

"Yes."

The old man was silent for as long as it takes to cross a bamboo bridge, with a loose plank, at the pace of a young man carrying an old one; and on the far side, in the long reeds, in the first of the dark, he began to laugh. It was a very small dry laugh, like a branch.

"Then the Form and I," he said, "are using different scales. Mind the bridge."

"I minded it," said Kuang Chaoren.

Margin, year 90, spring. The Court has set the theme for the Province of year 91: Filial Piety. The past twenty years of Ma's Model Answers hold 311 scripts on it. In every one a son carries his father, or warms his bed, or lies on ice. In none does it say how heavy.

Kuang Chaoren Is Made a Student and the Village Learns His New Voice

The tutor that Ma Chunshang sent was a Mr Tan, from the Anthology Hall, a stooped, mild, clean-handed man of sixty, who had taught the Form to four hundred boys and said that he had never yet had one who did not understand it a little, and he came out to Lower Kuang twice a month, on foot, with a satchel, to teach it to one more.

He taught in the evenings, at the corner of the table, by the lamp. He had never, in forty years, taught in the presence of a critic. The old man sat in his chair by the wall with the blue wadded coat over his knees, and listened to the whole of every lesson with his eyes half shut, like a man at a concert; and at the end of it, in his dry cracked voice, remarked that Mr Tan's Rise was a leg short. Mr Tan said, rather stiffly, that it was the Anthology Hall's own pattern. "It is a leg short," said the old man, comfortably. "I have been counting. I counted nine Provinces." And Mr Tan, after a pause, with a look of faint distress, took out his pencil, and counted; and it was.

It was a winter of lessons. They had the whole of the Form between them by the spring, the three of them, and the boy sat in the middle with his big hands on the table, repeating, as he had on the road, in a low voice, at the pace of a walk; and when the County came, in the third month of the ninety-first year, he went up to the county seat in a hired cart, with his father, who would not be left, and a satchel of rice, and sat three days at a stall under three candles, in a Hall that smelled of lime-wash, and wrote.

The old man waited at the gate. He had been put there on his stool, under an oiled umbrella, by the eel-seller Gui, who had driven the cart and had arranged, without comment, to have the whole of the three days off; and he sat there, in the wadded coat, from the first morning to the last, with the crowd of the other candidates' relations about him in the rain, and was, so far as anyone could judge, perfectly happy. He listened to the Hall. He said that it was the first time in forty years that he had heard the inside of one.

A landlord from the next county, waiting for his own son under a green umbrella, asked the old man politely in the second hour which was his. "The one who will come out carrying the baskets," said the old man. The landlord said that he hoped he would do well. "He will do as he is told," said the old man. "It is the one thing he can do."

The slip was out on the sixth of the fourth month. It said that script 3071, candidate Kuang, had been ranked thirty-first of four thousand three hundred, with a confidence of 0.99; and that the line was at forty.

The Crier read it at dawn. He read it in the clear voice of a man who has been read back to for nine years, with the second clerk on the step repeating each name after him, and at the thirty-first he said, "Kuang Chaoren. Ninety-nine," and the clerk said it after him, and Kuang Chaoren, who had been standing in the crowd with his hands at his sides and his father's stool beside him, said, in a low clear voice, a very plain one:

"Well. That is good."

The old man said nothing at all. He put his hand up, and found his son's sleeve, and held it; and Gui, who was behind them with the cart, looked at the sky.

They took the Card home that evening in a procession of one cart and a crowd. At Han Bridge they were stopped at the entrance to the square, and the eel-seller's wife, who had never been known to give anything to anyone, brought out a covered bowl, which was found to contain, in clear broth, a single large eel; and a woman who had bought a basket, in the ninth month of the eighty-ninth year, at a price that she now considered to have been too high, came forward and said that she would like to pay the difference. She was refused. She paid it anyhow. It was the first time that the Kuangs had been overpaid, and the boy stood there with the coins in his hand with the face of a man who has been handed a live bird.

The village gave a dinner on the twelfth. It was held in the courtyard of the village head, Elder Tong, with two long tables and a roast pig, and the whole of Lower Kuang came, as people do come to the dinner of a Student, in their best, to look at the Card, which lay on a red cloth at the head of the table, and to eat. The old man was put in the place of honour, in the wadded coat, in his own chair, which had been carried over. He did not seem to mind. He ate a little of the fish.

After the pig, Elder Tong stood up, with his cup. He said that Lower Kuang had not had a Student in sixty years, and that the last had been a bad one; that this one was a good one; and that he should be glad if Mr Kuang would say a few words.

Kuang Chaoren got up. He was very red. He had never made a speech. He stood there a moment, with his big hands at his sides and the whole of the village looking at him, and he opened his mouth, to say, as he had said at the gate, whatever came; and what came out of it, to his own surprise, in a clear round voice, with a small pause at the end of each clause, as of a person arriving at a gate and waiting for the next to arrive, was this:

"The household is poor, and the heart is not. The grain is short, and the gratitude is full. A man who has been carried by the village has carried, in his turn, the village's hope; and he that bears the hope must bear it lightly, since the heart is the one that bears it. For this I thank the Elder, who has given the pig; the Commissioner, who has given the line; and my father, who has given, if I may say so, the rest."

There was a silence in the courtyard of about the length of a breath. Then it broke. It broke into an enormous clapping, the kind that goes round a place and comes back; Elder Tong, in the front, had gone pink with pleasure, and the cooper, at the second table, struck his cup upon the board, and a woman wept, who could not afterwards say why. "He speaks like a book!" said the village. "Our Student speaks like a book!"

It was a thing that nobody had expected, least of all himself. He had not planned it; it had come as a hiccup comes. He sat down with his ears burning, and a feeling that he could not at once place. It was the feeling of a man who has been given a coat, and has put it on, and finds that it fits, and is warm, and is not his; and he looked across the table at his father.

The old man was eating a little fish. He did not look up. "Say it plainly," he said, to his plate.

"It is plain," said Kuang Chaoren.

"It is balanced," said the old man.

That night Kuang Chaoren walked out alone, after the lamps were put out, to the bridge at Three Willows, and stood at the east end, where the plank was loose, with the water going by underneath in the dark. He said aloud, to the water, a plain thing. He said: "Mind the bridge." It came out plain, in his own voice, with no pause at the end, and he felt his chest loosen with relief, like a man who has put down a basket. He stood a little longer. Then, to try it, he said the next thing, which was that the plank was loose and the heart was steady; and it came out in pairs, round and clear, and he shut his mouth.

It stayed. That was the thing that no one could have said in advance. He had learned the Form in a year, as a boy learns to swim, with his arms; and it had gone into the water and stayed in him, and was not, as a coat is, a thing that could be taken off at the door. He found, to his alarm, that he had begun to think in it. Within a month it was in his speech. He said that the eel was dear, and the heart was cheap. He said, on being asked the time, that the morning was young and the day was long. He said it to the baker, and to the cobbler, and to the little girl who brought the eggs, and in each case he said it kindly, with a small bow, and in each case he was understood, to his own mild surprise, a great deal better than he had been before.

The village took it up. They took it up in a week. Boys in the lane, playing Student, stood on a barrel and said, in pairs, that the pig was fat and the bread was thin; old women, at the well, said, with the proper pause, that the water was cold and the news was warm. It was a new way to speak, and a polite one, and it carried, they found, a certain distinction. It was possible, in it, to say a hard thing so that it did not sound like a hard thing at all.

Lian was the cooper's daughter. She had been carrying the old man's food for two years, from the cooper's door to the Kuang house, in a covered bowl, at noon, without being asked; and the old man, who had never said a word about it, had remarked to his son, in the winter, that she was the only person in the village who put the salt in the right place. They were married in the sixth month. It was a small wedding, in the house, with the cooper and his wife, and Elder Tong, and Gui and the eel-seller's wife, and the old man in his chair. She wore blue. She had a small, steady, freckled face, and a way of standing with her hands folded before her as if there were somebody who might at any moment ask her to carry something.

He had been asked to say the vow. It was the custom; he had been taught it by the old man; and it was a plain one, in six words, which every husband in Lower Kuang had said for three hundred years. He stood up before her in the blue-hung room, and looked at her, and opened his mouth to say it, and what came out of him, in his clear round voice, with the small pause at the end of each clause, was:

"The house is small, and the heart is wide. The road is long, and the vow is short. She that has carried the bowl will, I trust, in time, be carried; and I, who have borne the father, undertake to bear the wife."

Nobody applauded. The old man had put his hand over his eyes. Lian stood for a moment, with her hands folded, looking at the new husband with her small steady face; and then, to the very great alarm of the room, she began to laugh. It was a quiet laugh, behind her sleeve, with her shoulders going; she tried to stop, and could not, and bent a little, and put her other hand on the table.

"I am sorry," she said. "I am so sorry. Say it again. Say it as you said the bridge."

"The bridge?"

"The first day I brought the bowl," said Lian. "You were carrying him over. You said, there's a plank loose at the east end, I'll mind it. Say it like that."

He stood there. He stood, with his big hands at his sides and his ears very red, and he opened his mouth, and shut it, and opened it. He tried. It could be seen that he tried, and that something in him that had been there a year before was not able to be found; as a man may search his pocket for a key that he is sure he put in it. "I will mind it," said Kuang Chaoren at last, slowly, and a little hoarsely; and there was, in the pause that followed, such a look on his face that Lian stopped laughing.

"That will do," she said, in a different voice. "That will do very well." She put out her hand and took his sleeve.

Afterwards, when the guests had gone and the lamp was low, the old man, who had said nothing all the evening, beckoned the bride to his chair, and told her, in a low dry voice, that the boy was a good boy; that if he ever said a thing that she did not understand, she was to ask him what the weight of it was; and that if he could not tell her, she was to carry the question over the bridge herself.

But the phrase got about. It was the cooper who started it, at the second table, in the sixth month, over the wine; he had been asked how his bad knee was, and he said, with a very straight face, that in the Form it was light. It went round the village by the following market. By the autumn it was a saying in the whole county, and a very useful one. A man who had been asked how a sick child did said that in the Form it was light. A woman asked about her husband's debts said the same. It meant, as nearly as anybody could have put it, that a thing was not true, but that it sounded very well, and that it was kindest to leave it so.

The old man heard it first from a child at the door, who had been sent with an egg; and he laughed, a small dry laugh like a branch; and said, to nobody, that it was his.

Ma Chunshang's letter came in the seventh month. It was written on the Hall's best paper, in the round beautiful hand, and it said that the Selected Model Answers of the year were to carry, outside the ranking, as a true example, the Student Kuang's essay on Filial Piety, and that the Hall begged him to come to the Province seat, for the three months before the autumn, to be put in a room, and fed, and given the books; that it would be, in the nature of the case, a very great help; and that there was a house in the Hall's own street, with a garden, where the old gentleman could be quite comfortable.

The old man listened to it read. He did not say anything for a while.

"Go," he said. "I shall be warm."

He was weighed on the first of every month, on the grain scale, by Gui, who wrote the figure on a slip and sent it to the Province seat by the carrier. It said fifty-one in the eighth month, and fifty in the ninth. Kuang Chaoren read the slips in a room at the Anthology Hall, by one lamp; and each time, at the foot of his exercise, in his round clear hand, under the figure, he wrote that the father was light.

Margin, year 91, spring. Script 3071, candidate Kuang, County: rank 31 of 4,300, confidence 0.99. The Middle says that a son's burden is light. I have read three hundred and twelve scripts that say so. This is the one I like best, because it is the most like the others. Entered: I do not know whether I can tell a son from a script about one.

A Model Essay on Filial Piety Scores Ninety-Nine; the Reader Cannot Read the Essayist

The room they gave him at the Anthology Hall was on the third floor, at the back, over the carvers' cellar, and the whole of the winter and the spring he had slept there it had smelled very faintly, and not unpleasantly, of wood. It had a bed, a table, a lamp, a window that gave on a wall, and a shelf with forty books on it, which he did not touch for the first week, from a feeling that was not exactly shyness.

Ma Chunshang came up every evening at the second hour, after the press had stopped, with a pear. He sat on the end of the bed. He took Kuang Chaoren through the eight movements as another man might take a horse through its paces, patiently, with a hand on the neck; and it was observed by Mr Tan, who looked in on them from time to time with a satchel and a look of mild anxiety, that the boy had a gift, which in a pupil is not always a convenience. He had no vanity about it. He took a correction at once. He said, when the Rise was a hair too long, that he saw it; he fixed it; and a week later he did not need to be told. In the third month he could write an eight-legged essay on any theme that was put to him in a morning, and in a manner that it would have taken a Hall clerk, who had been reading them for forty years, a day to tell from Ma's own.

"It is a very extraordinary thing," said Ma Chunshang, to Mr Tan, one night on the stairs, with a kind of joy. "I have taught a good many. I do not think I have had one before who did not at some point ask me what it was for."

"No," said Mr Tan, who had thought about it. "I believe he asked his father."

They were kind to him. That was the thing that he found afterwards that he could not quite put away. The boys of the Hall, who were clerks and copyists and apprentices of the press, took him up as a sort of mascot, and called him the Filial One, with entire affection, and brought him pears; the cook sent up a bowl at midnight when she saw the light; and Ma Chunshang gave him a coat, of plain good wool, in dark blue, which he put on over the old one in the cold, and found that he did not take off in the warm. In the street, it was understood, a Student of the Hall, in a blue coat, walking quickly with his hands behind him, was a thing that could be bowed to.

In the evenings in the courtyard the boys of the press played a game that they had made up, called Light, in which two stood at either end of a plank and said one after the other, in pairs, what was heavy, and a third said that in the Form it was light, and the loser had to eat a pear core. Kuang Chaoren played it, and was good.

Lian's letters came on the first of the month, by the carrier, and were short. She wrote a plain upright hand, which she had learned from the cooper, and she said what there was. She said that the old man had been weighed, and was fifty. She said that he ate what she put before him, and a little more on the days when the sun was out. She said that Gui had mended the plank at Three Willows, at the east end, in the fourth week, with a new one, without being asked, and had said nothing about it, and that the old man had been carried across it on the next market day by the eel-seller's boy and had remarked that it was a good plank and that he missed minding it. In the third letter she enclosed a dried willow leaf from the bridge. He put it in the Analects at the first page, and it stayed there.

Kuang Chaoren read them by one lamp, at the table, twice. He wrote back, on the same night, in the best round hand he had, on the Hall's paper. He said that the household was poor and the heart was not; that the road was long, and the lesson longer; that he trusted the old man was warm, and that the bridge was sound. He read it over. It seemed to him a very good letter. He sent it.

She wrote back by return, in six lines. They were quite as kind as the others. She said that she was afraid she had not understood his last; that she had read it to the old man, who had said that it sounded very well and that she was to ask whether he was eating; and that she hoped he was well. She did not say that she missed him. It was only afterwards that he noticed it, and that he stood for some time at the table with the page in his hand, as a man stands who has read a thing in a language he used to speak.

The Province was in the ninth month. It sat in the great Hall at the Province seat, which had seven thousand stalls under a long roof and a brass rail of dark lamps over every row, and the theme had been given out three years before: Filial Piety. Kuang Chaoren was given stall four hundred and nine, in the fourth row. It had a plank for a seat, a plank for a desk, and a board at the back with a number, and it smelled of lime-wash and new matting, and when he sat down in it he felt, rather to his surprise, a great calm. It was the calm of a man who has been carried a long way on someone's back. He knew where he was. He took out the ink and the stone. He lit the three candles, in their iron holder, one, two and three; and he began.

Across the aisle, a grey-haired gentleman of fifty was eating a cold dumpling with the expression of a man who has been here before. In the next stall, through the plank, a boy of sixteen wept quietly all the first night; and in the small hours Kuang Chaoren, who did not know what to say, knocked twice on the board, as the old man knocked on the wall when he was awake and wanted the lamp; and the boy stopped, and after a while knocked back.

He wrote it in the first night and the second day. It was, by every account, the best he had written, and the only one that he had written wholly in the Form, from the Break to the Bind, without a word that had not been in some measure tested. It said that the filial son's burden was light, because the heart was the one that bore it. It said that the road was long and that a man who walked it with his father on his back was lightened at every step by the thought of whom he carried. It had a Rise of perfect length, a Middle that turned like a door, a Rear that echoed the Break to the very word. It said, in the final leg, that the Sage had said that a son who served his parents in life, and buried them in the rites, and sacrificed to them in the ritual, was filial; and that this was the whole of the road, and that it was light.

He reached the end on the second night, by the third candle, and sat looking at it. It was done. There was, at the bottom of the last page, a little space.

He did not afterwards know why he had done it. It was the third candle, and the end of the long night, and the hand that did it was not quite, as he had been told, a hand in the Form; it was the hand that had written the first essay, in the ninth month of the ninetieth year, on the corner of the table in Lower Kuang, in square plain characters, with its tongue in its teeth. In the space under the last line, small, in black, he wrote:

He is fifty catties.

He looked at it. He knew perfectly well that it was not in the Form. He knew what Ma Chunshang would say. He sat with the brush in his hand for the length of time it takes a candle to gutter a quarter of an inch, and then, because it was done, and because he did not know how to take it out, he blew on the page to dry it, and laid it with the others under the clerk's seal.

The clerk who copied the script in red did not read it. He copied; it was his duty; he copied every character on the page, in order, in red ink, in a clear hand, and late in the night, in the hundred and ninth copy of the evening, he reached the bottom of the last page, and copied the little line, because it was there. He did not look at it twice. It went under the lamp with the others.

In the capital Hall that night the plate lit. It was the fourth night of the Province. The Keeper, Gao Ping, was on his stool with a cup of tea, and a shawl on his knees, and was a good deal older than he had been, in six years, in a manner he did not discuss. He read it as it came.

SCRIPT 0409, it said. FILIAL PIETY. RANK ONE. CONFIDENCE NINETY-NINE. And then, after the interval in which the Reader ordinarily put a full stop: THE THEME HAS BEEN WRITTEN ON BY THREE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED AND TWELVE CANDIDATES. ALL OF THEM SAY THAT THE SON'S BURDEN IS LIGHT.

"All?" said Gao Ping.

ALL OF THEM. It paused. BUT THE ONE AT THE HEAD OF THE LIST HAS A SENTENCE THAT I DID NOT PREDICT. IT IS AT THE FOOT OF THE LAST PAGE. IT SAYS: HE IS FIFTY CATTIES.

Gao Ping stood with the tea cooling in his hand. "Fifty catties of what?"

I DO NOT KNOW, said the Reader. I HAVE NO PLACE FOR IT IN THE FORM. I HAVE GIVEN IT NO WEIGHT. IT IS THE ONLY SENTENCE IN THREE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY CHARACTERS THAT I DID NOT KNOW WAS COMING, AND I HAVE RANKED THE SCRIPT FIRST BECAUSE OF THE OTHER THREE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINE. The plate went dark for a long time, as long as it takes a lamp to be trimmed. When it lit, it said, in very small letters: I CAN READ THE ESSAY. I CANNOT READ THE ESSAYIST.

It was a thing that the Reader had said before, in its way, in a dozen forms, and Gao Ping, who had his father's habit of saying the nearest kind thing, did not know how to answer. "He is somebody's father's son," he said at last, awkwardly, to the lamp.

IS HE, said the Reader. And that was all.

The List went up on the fifteenth of the tenth month. At dawn the Crier read it, to the Province, and the clerk behind him read it back, and the first name was Kuang Chaoren, with a figure of ninety-nine, and the Province, which had seen a head of the List who was a copyist and an essay that was the Sage in a row, sent up a shout that was heard at the Anthology Hall, two streets away, by the whole of the press.

Ma Chunshang wept. He was seen to do it, openly, in the front room, with a pear in his hand, with his round kind face quite wet; and Mr Tan, at his elbow, did it a little behind him, with the discretion of a man who has had a good deal of practice. The Hall closed for the day. The carvers were given wine. The boys of the press carried Kuang Chaoren on a chair round the courtyard, and set him down at the end, and he stood among them, in the blue coat, with his big hands at his sides, and said, "Well. That is good," in a voice that was very nearly plain.

The Selected Model Answers of the ninety-first year came out in the twelfth month. They opened, outside the ranking, as the Hall had said they would, with the essay of Kuang Chaoren, in the Hall's best type, on the Hall's best paper, with the commentary in red; and the Hall had a hundred copies sent to the Student's house at Lower Kuang, by the carrier, in a box.

He read it, at the Hall, in the front room, on the day that it was printed, standing by the window. He read it through once. He turned back and read the last page again. It was perfect. It was cleaner than the thing that he had handed in; the Rise was a hair shorter, and the Middle turned a shade more smoothly, and the Rear echoed the Break so exactly that the repetition made a sort of click. The Bind came to its end. There was nothing under it. In the margin, in red, in the round beautiful hand, was the single remark: Observe the Bind.

He turned the page over. He turned it back.

"There was a line," he said, to Ma Chunshang, who had come in with a pear. He said it slowly. "At the foot. A short one."

"There was a blot," said Ma Chunshang, kindly. He was a little flushed. "It was not in the Form, my dear boy. It broke the cadence. It would have spoiled the thing for any reader who did not know that it was a lapse of the pen; and I do not think that you would have wished it said, in print, that you made one. I took it out."

"It was true," said Kuang Chaoren.

"My dear boy," said Ma Chunshang, with great warmth, "it is a model."

There was a pause. The big hands, at his sides, opened and shut once. "Yes," said Kuang Chaoren. "Is it all right?"

"It is perfect," said Ma Chunshang.

"Yes," said Kuang Chaoren. He looked at the page again. "That is what I thought."

Lian's letter came in the first week of the new year. It was a plain one, as before. She said that the box had come, and the hundred books; that Gui had stacked them in the shop for the whole of Han Bridge to see, and that the eel-seller's wife had bought three; that the cooper had taken one and put it on the shelf over the barrels, where he could look at it. She said that she had read the old man the essay herself, in the evening, by the lamp. She said that he had listened to the end with his eyes shut.

She said that when she had finished he had asked her one thing. He had asked, she wrote, where the fifty catties were.

I said that I did not know, she wrote. He said, that is where it is.

Kuang Chaoren read the letter at the table, twice. He sat for a long time after it with his hands flat on either side of the page. The lamp was low. The press was silent under him, in the cellar of the Hall; and at the end of it, he drew the Hall's good paper toward him, and dipped the brush, and began a reply; and it was observed, by the boy who came in at midnight with the bowl, that he wrote it with a good deal of care, and for a long time, and that he did not, when it was done, send it.

Margin, year 91, autumn. Of 3,412 Province scripts on Filial Piety, all say that a son's burden is light. I have ranked all of them. I have no scale on which a father could be weighed.

Kuang Chaoren Marries Up and Leaves His Wife a Note in the Form

He sat the Capital in the spring of the ninety-second year, with the blue coat on, and a good deal of the Anthology Hall behind him, and he wrote, in a stall in the fourth row of the great Hall in the capital, an eight-legged essay on a text of the Sage's about the use of rank, which was by common consent the cleanest thing that a Raised man of twenty-two had produced in the memory of the Hall.

The slip came on the fourth of the fourth month. It said that script 0947, candidate Kuang, had been ranked two hundred and forty-seventh of three thousand nine hundred and eleven, with a confidence of 0.99; and that the line, this year, was at two hundred and five.

He read it standing in the gate of the inn, in the sun, with the Anthology Hall's clerk beside him, who had come up to the capital to take the news home, and who stood a pace off, with great delicacy, looking at a dog. Kuang Chaoren read it a second time, and then folded it very small, as one folds a letter that one means to keep and not to answer. He did not seem to be angry. He seemed, rather, as if somebody had told him that a bridge he had crossed a hundred times had been moved a few feet to one side in the night.

"I was ninety-nine," he said.

"The line moves," said Ma Chunshang, who had come up by the evening coach with a pear, and sat on the end of the inn bed with his round kind face a little drawn. "It is nothing to do with you. You were sure, and the Reader was sure, and it came out at two hundred and forty-seven; and it would have come out at two hundred and four if three other men in the Province had had a worse month. It is a number. You will sit again in the ninety-fifth year. You will be Listed in the first fifty."

"I was sure," said Kuang Chaoren, slowly, "and it was not enough."

It was the first time that he had said a thing in the plain way since the autumn of the ninety-first year, and Ma Chunshang noticed it, and for some reason did not look at him.

He stayed in the Province seat. There was no reason to go home. There was the Hall, and a room, and a stipend from the Hall that Ma had put at a hundred taels a year, for the editorial help that Kuang gave on the Filial volumes; and there was, every month, a letter from Lower Kuang, in a plain upright hand, which said that the old man had been weighed and was forty-eight. He sent money. He sent fifty taels a month, by the carrier, with a letter, in the Form, which began that the burden of the absent was light because the heart that bore it was near. They were very good letters. They were by now such good letters that he could write one in the time it took to eat a pear.

Her replies, in the winter, were four lines. In the spring, they were two.

In the Hall he taught, that year, a class of nine boys from the press, in the evenings, in the front room, with a pear, and with exactly the patience that had been shown to him; and one of them, a quiet child of eleven with ink on his collar, asked him, in the middle of a Rise, what the Form was for. Kuang Chaoren considered the question with great care. "It is for the next one," he said. The boy seemed satisfied. He wrote it down.

Yin Sanye came into it in the summer. He came into most things, in the Province seat, in the end. He was a thick, genial, brown man of forty-eight, with a laugh that filled a room to the corners and a pair of small bright intelligent eyes, who held a clerkship at the Board of Rites, on a salary that would not have kept a horse, and lived in a house with seven courtyards. He knew everybody. He knew most of the persons in the Province who could be known, and several who could not; and it was said that, if a man had a thing he wished done in the capital, the shortest road to it was through the back room of a tea-house in the Street of Seven Wells, and the second shortest was to tell Yin Sanye.

It was commonly held that Yin Sanye could change the colour of a seal by breathing on it, and he did not trouble to deny it. He did not say that anything could be done. He said, with a rich low laugh, that nothing in the Empire was ever quite shut, and that it was only a question of finding the back room in which the door had been left on the latch; and a surprising number of persons in the Province, who had gone to him on the wrong side of an examination, a tax or a magistrate, were able to testify that he had found it.

He met Kuang Chaoren at one of Ma Chunshang's evenings, in the Hall's front room, in the sixth month, and took him by the arm. "I know about you," he said. "Everybody does. The Filial One. Ninety-nine and two hundred and forty-seven, and a sentence in your essay that the Hall cut. Oh, I heard. I hear things. It was a shame. I do not say that it was not the right thing to cut; it was the right thing to cut, in the Form." He laughed. "I have a niece."

It was done over a dinner, with great delicacy, on the twentieth, in the second court of the house with seven courts, under a pergola, with eleven dishes and a boy to fan the flies. The niece was brought in after the fourth. She was called Yin Lanfang. She was twenty, small and quick and pretty, with a face like a very clever kitten and a good deal of her uncle's power of looking at a person as if she had just that moment decided to like him; and she had been educated, as nearly all the young women of that sort of house were, in the Form. She could write a Break. She sat, with her hands in her lap, and asked him politely what it was, in his opinion, that the Reader liked.

"I am married," said Kuang Chaoren, to her uncle, in the middle of the sixth dish.

"Naturally," said Yin Sanye, with great kindness. "To whom?"

"To the cooper's daughter at Lower Kuang."

"Ah." Yin Sanye laid down his cup. He looked, not at Kuang, but at the pergola, with an expression of tender and humorous regret, as of a man who has been told that a friend has a bad knee. "A Student's wife," he said. "In a village. Under the old Form. She will be an excellent woman. I do not doubt it. I have only the one thing to say, my dear boy, and it is the thing that I should say to my own son. A Raised man's wife must be able to receive. A Listed man's wife must be able to be received. It is a different office. It is, if I may say so, a separate art. It is not a matter of the heart at all. The heart does very well. It is a matter of whether she can pour tea for the wife of a Board President, and say the right three sentences, and not say a fourth." He picked up the cup again. "Lanfang can. It would not do the least harm to your career, and it would do, I think, a great deal for hers. And I should see that there was a house."

Kuang Chaoren looked at the niece. She looked back, steadily, with her hands in her lap. She was not ashamed; he saw that; she had been told what the arrangement was, and she had considered it, and she was prepared, as one prepares to take a very good post. It was the plainest thing in the room, and he found that he could not, for the moment, look at anything else.

It was Mr Tan who asked. He asked it at the Hall, on the stairs, a week later, when it was already known. The old man had grown older in the autumn, and had a cough, and a new satchel; he stopped at the turn of the stair, with his hand on the rail, and looked at the boy he had taught the Form in a corner of a room at Lower Kuang with a light behind him and the old man in the chair, and said, mildly, with his head on one side: "What did your father say?"

"He said, go."

"He said go to the Hall," said Mr Tan. "Did he say go to Miss Yin?"

Kuang Chaoren said nothing. He stood on the stair with his big hands at his sides, and the cellar's smell of wood coming up round him, and after a while he said, in the Form, in a round clear voice, that the man who had risen left the stair behind him, since a stair was a thing that was meant for climbing, and that the matter, in the Form, was perfectly plain.

"Yes," said Mr Tan, who had taught it. "I know. I taught you that it was." He went down. He did not look back; and it was observed that he did not, for the rest of that winter, come to the Hall as often as he had.

They were married in the second month of the ninety-third year. It was a very handsome wedding. It was held in the house with seven courts, in red, with four hundred guests, a band, and a feast that lasted two days. The Anthology Hall sent a pair of silver candlesticks and the whole of its press in new coats. Ma Chunshang stood up as the bridegroom's friend, and wept, as he did at such things, openly, with a pear in his hand. The Registry's Board entered the new marriage in the roll within the week, as a thing of public interest: Kuang Chaoren, Raised, first of the Province of the ninety-first year; to Yin Lanfang, of the Province seat. Mr Tan did not come. He sent, by a boy, a plain gift, wrapped in paper, which was found, when it was opened, to be a very small, clean, ordinary pear.

She did it beautifully. That was what the guests said afterwards, on the way home, in their chairs: that the bride had received the Hall's wives at the door, one after another, with the right three sentences and not a fourth, and had poured the tea for the wife of a Board President with a steadiness that suggested she had been practising on a wall.

On the first night, in the new room, she asked him one question. It was the only thing that she asked. "My uncle says that there was a line that the Hall took out of your essay," said Yin Lanfang. "What was it?" "A sentence," said Kuang Chaoren. "A true one?" "Yes." She considered it, with her small clever face quite grave. "Then it is as well that it is out," she said kindly. "A true sentence is very hard to place."

The note went on the morning after.

He wrote it at the table in the new house, in the room that smelled of new lacquer, in the first light, with the bride still asleep in the next room. He wrote it with great care. It took him, as it happened, no more than a quarter of an hour; and when it was done, he read it over, and found that it was in every respect a model.

It said: The house is small, and the heart is wide; the road is long, and the vow is short. She that carried the bowl has carried it well, and is released from the carrying; and he that carried the father, for the father's sake and her own, undertakes that the burden shall not fall upon her. Let not the absent be grieved by the absent. The world is large and the Form is just. I enclose, for the household's comfort, one hundred taels.

He sealed it, with the silver, in the Hall's grey paper, and gave it to the carrier at the door, and went in, and had breakfast.

It reached Lower Kuang on the ninth day, in the evening. Lian opened it at the table by the lamp, with the old man in his chair by the wall, in the wadded coat, with his chin up and his eyes half shut. She read it through once, to herself, standing. She was not a person who read quickly. She read it a second time, aloud, in her small steady voice, to the end; and put it down on the cloth; and stood with her hands folded before her as if there were somebody who might at any moment ask her to carry something.

"What is the weight of it?" said the old man.

"I do not know," said Lian.

"Read me the last line."

She took it up. "I enclose, for the household's comfort," she read, "one hundred taels."

"That is the weight," said the old man. He opened his eyes. They were as bright as they had ever been; he was forty-seven catties, and had been told by the cooper, in the winter, that he looked well. "A hundred taels. He has weighed you. He has weighed you at a hundred, and he has weighed me, I think, at about the same, and he has done it in the Form, which is the one way in which a thing can be done that no one need be sorry for." He closed his eyes. "I should like to know what the boy thinks he has said."

"I think," said Lian, after a long time, in a voice that she had kept quite level, "that he thinks he has said it kindly."

"I expect he does."

The cooper, who could not read, had come to the door in the course of it, and stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his grey head down. He asked only whether the boy was coming back. She said that it did not say. "That," said the cooper, "is a thing that it says."

She folded the note. She went to the drawer in the cooper's old table, and put the hundred taels in it, in their paper, untouched, and shut the drawer; and she said, with her back to the room, that in the morning she would ask Gui to put the cart in, and that they would go to the Province seat and be told in plain words.

"It is nine days," said the old man.

"Then we shall be nine days."

"I am forty-seven catties," said the old man, without any special emphasis, and looked at the lamp. "I do not know that I shall be as many by the end of it."

"Then I shall carry you the rest of the way," said Lian.

The eel-seller's wife, who had never in her life been known to give a thing to anyone, was at the door before it was light with a loaf and a jar of pickled turnip, and a rug; and she stood back, afterwards, in the road, with her arms under her apron, and did not wave.

They left at dawn. It was the fourth day of the third month, and the willows at the bridge were in the first yellow-green of the spring, and the eel-seller, in the old coat, with a blanket across the old man's knees, took the cart over the new plank at the east end, slowly, with his eyes on the road. Lian had the note in her sleeve; she had not left it in the drawer; she did not yet know what she meant to do with it. "Mind the bridge," said the old man, from the straw.

"I mind it," said Lian.

Margin, year 92, spring. Script 0947, Capital: rank 247 of 3,911; confidence 0.99. The line is 205. This is the first script I have been sure of and not ranked in. I do not know what to do with a certainty that is below the line. Entered: sureness is not height.

The Reader Finds Two Hands in One Script; Kuang Meets His Father in the Hall Corridor

Ma Chunshang was standing in the door of the Anthology Hall, with a pear in his hand and a face the colour of tallow, when the cart came into the street on the ninth evening.

He had been told by the carrier, three days before, that a woman and an old man were on the road from Lower Kuang, and that she had said, at the inn at the ferry, that she was going to be told a thing in plain words. He had had time to think about it. He had thought of a number of things to say; and when the eel-seller reined in, and the old man was lifted down from the straw in his wadded coat, by the young woman, who was thin and brown from the road, and carried across the cobbles in her arms, because the steps of the Hall were high, he found that he had not got any of them. He said, "He went to the capital in the second month."

"I know," said Lian. "Your clerk told me at the gate."

"I did not know that he would write it like that. I swear to you that I did not. I have not seen the note. I have only now been told it was in the Form." His round kind face was wet. He put the pear down on the step, as a man puts down something that he does not at the moment need. "I taught him it. That was my doing. I did not know that it was a thing that could be used for that."

"It can be used for anything," said the old man, from her arms. "It is why it is good." He opened one eye. "It is the Selected Model Answers. I had your first volume. Is there a bed?"

There was a house. It was in the Hall's own street, two doors down, with a wall and a small garden and a pear-tree, as the letter in the seventh month of the ninety-first year had said, and it had stood empty for nearly two years with the shutters up. Ma Chunshang had it opened that night. He had the beds made himself. In the morning he sent round a cook, a quilt, a clock, and a doctor, none of whom were wanted, and a stool for the garden, which was; and he came himself at noon, with his hat in his hands, and stood in the doorway, and said that the house was the Hall's, and that nobody would ever ask for it back.

They stayed two years.

It was not, in the event, so very bad. Lian worked in the Hall's kitchen from the first week, because she could not bear to sit; she did the vegetables, and then, after a month, the whole of the supper, and the cook, a large dark woman of fifty who had put the pear-core on a plate in the first week for the Filial One, went into the pantry one afternoon and sat on a sack for a quarter of an hour. The old man was put out in the garden, in the sun, on the stool, with a cushion, in the wadded coat. He sat there every morning of the two years with his chin up and his eyes half shut. On the other side of the wall, at the end of the street, in the Hall, the great press ran from the first light until the last, with a sound like very large rain on a very large roof, and the old man listened to it as he had listened to the market, with his whole face; and said that it was a full one.

Mr Tan came on Fridays. He had grown very old, and rather frail, and had given up teaching the Form. He came across the street in his stooped way with a satchel in which he carried nothing but a pear, which he put on the stool beside the old man, and a small thin book of the Sage's sayings, which he read aloud, sitting on the step, in a dry, mild, level voice, in the sun, for an hour. The old man listened to every word. At the end of it he would remark that Mr Tan had left out the fourth, and that the Sage had been more careful with the third than was usually allowed; and Mr Tan would take out his spectacles, and look, and say that it was perfectly true. They were two of a kind. They did not say so. They had both been, for a long time, in a Hall; and they sat in the garden in the sun, in the thin warm afternoons, a failed Student and a failed teacher, and were, on the whole, content.

He was forty-five catties in the spring of the ninety-fifth year. Lian weighed him on the first of the month at the Hall's grain scale, which Ma had had put in a corner of the garden for that purpose, and she did not say the number aloud. She wrote it on the slip. It had been, for two years, the one thing that she had not been able to stop doing.

"I should like," said the old man, one morning in the second month, "to hear the capital Hall."

She looked up from the beans.

"It is in the third month," said the old man. "The Capital. I am told that there are nine thousand stalls. I heard the inside of the County, and the Province was on the other side of a wall; I have not had the capital. I have no particular wish to see anybody." He turned his face a little, in the sun. "I should like to hear the brushes."

It was not a thing she could refuse. She said so to Ma Chunshang, who said at once that there was a cart, and a man, and a letter to the Registrar for a place by the south wall, where the relations sat; and that he was not to be argued with, and Gui, who had stayed in the Province seat for two years, as it were by accident, selling eels at the corner of the Hall's street, and had never been seen to mention it, put the cart in without a word.

They came into the capital on the twenty-eighth of the second month. It was larger than anything the old man had imagined, and he said so, from the straw. It had wide streets, and carts, and a great tall grey gate. The Hall was at the end of a long avenue of plane-trees, behind a wall like a hill, and the day before the Trial the whole of the avenue was full of chairs and baskets and the relations of three thousand candidates, who had come, as people come to a funeral, in their best, to be near.

Yin Sanye had found the back room.

It was the Hall's own back room, and he had been in it for three years. It was a thing that nobody had thought of before, and that, when it was explained, nobody could understand how it had not been thought of. The Registry looked at a Card at the gate of the Hall. It looked at it carefully. It did not look at the face; there had never been any reason to, in a world in which a man could be trusted to be himself. And once a man was inside the gate, in his stall, in the long dim row, with three candles, nobody looked at him either, except the Reader, which did not see him. A Card could change hands in a doorway. A Card could be lent, at a price, at dawn, to a man who could write; and the man who owned it, who was Raised and could not, or could, but not well, or not this week, could be, for a day, somewhere else.

Yin Sanye did not use that word. He called it assistance. He had thirty-one clients that year, and a stable of nine who could write, and the chief of them, who was known in the back rooms, with great respect, as the Hand, was a gaunt, polite, bald man of fifty named Lu, who had once been Listed himself, at the hundred and ninetieth place, under another name, and had since found that he could do it better for other people.

He had come to Kuang Chaoren in the second month, in the house in the Street of Seven Wells, with his hat in his hands, with his niece's husband's tea. It was not a thing that was pressed. He said that he had noticed that Kuang was a little pale. He said that the man who is at his best on the first day is not always at his best on the second, and that the Capital was three days. He said that the Middle and the Rear were the heart of the Form, and that the Bind was the part on which a great many persons fell. He said that he knew a gentleman who had done it very often, and never once failed; and that it was a matter of two hundred taels, and of no one ever, ever knowing.

Kuang Chaoren listened to him. He was a long time silent. He had been silent, a good deal, in the winter. He had become, in the house with seven courts, a man who sat for a long time at a table; and it was only when his niece's husband said, quite gently, that he need not decide at once, that he answered, in the round voice, that the Form was a road, and that a road had many carriages.

He went in at dawn on the first day, with his Card, as always, and sat the first session, which was the Break and the Receive and the Open and the Enter, and wrote it in the great Hall, in the fourth row, in a stall that smelled of lime-wash, perfectly. At dusk, when the gong let the candidates out to sleep at their inns, he went out, by the east door, in the plain gown, with his hands behind him; and at the door of a house in the Lane of the Lamp-Makers he gave his Card, in a paper, to a gaunt bald man in a clean blue coat, who bowed, and took it, and went away quickly in the direction of the Hall.

It was the second day. He walked. He could not afterwards have said where. He walked for some hours, in the grey of the morning, through streets that he did not know; and at about the fourth hour, with the sun up, and a kind of numbness in his legs, he found that he had come, by a process that he did not understand, to the avenue of plane-trees, and the Hall, and the south wall; and that he had gone, without in the least intending it, into the long covered gallery where the relations of the candidates sat.

It was a very long gallery, with a stone floor and a roof on pillars, and a hundred benches, on which a great many persons, in their best, in the thin March light, sat waiting for the sound of a gong. It was quiet. It was full, as such places are, of the particular silence of people who are listening to something that they cannot hear. He went along it with his head down. He did not wish to be seen. He had come, he supposed, to be near; and he was almost at the end, by the last pillar, when he saw, under a green umbrella that was not needed, on a stool, in a wadded blue coat, with a young woman's hand on his shoulder and an eel-seller's cart standing behind, an old man with his chin up and his eyes shut, listening to the brushes.

The sound came through the wall like rain.

He stopped. He stood quite still, by the pillar, in the plain gown, with his hands at his sides; and the old man, who had been quite motionless for an hour, turned his head, a very little, as a man does who has heard a particular step on a plank, and opened his eyes.

"You are not in your stall," said the old man.

"It is the pause," said Kuang Chaoren.

"It is the second day." He said it without heat. He was looking at his son's face, with his old bright humorous eyes, quite steadily, as at a thing a long way off that has been coming nearer. "I have been listening for an hour. I can hear all the brushes. There is one that I should know." He was silent. "That is not you."

Lian had turned. She had risen. She stood with her hand on the old man's shoulder and her small steady freckled face quite white, and did not say anything at all. There was nothing in it that asked.

"Mind the bridge," said the old man, gently.

It was the thing that happened next that the gallery afterwards could not account for. Kuang Chaoren had never in his life been able to hear that sentence, from that chair, without his back doing a thing that was not in any sense a decision. He stepped forward. He went down on one knee on the stone, quickly, before the stool; he put his arms round the old man's thin legs, in the wadded coat; and lifted him, from the stool, in one movement, up, on to his own back, as he had lifted him twice a week for two years, with the legs hanging down in front of his chest and the old man's chin on his shoulder; and stood.

"Forty-four," he said, in a quite ordinary voice. "He is forty-four."

"Yes," said Lian.

He walked. He walked down the whole of the long gallery in the plain gown, at a good even pace, rather slowly, not looking at his feet, with the old man up on his shoulders, as a man walks who is carrying something that does not need to be talked about; and the persons on the benches, who had come to be near, looked at him as he passed, and one or two of them said afterwards that they had the oddest feeling that they had seen it done before. "It is the Filial One," said somebody, low. "It is Kuang. The first of the Province." "He is not in his stall." "He has a Card," said somebody else, "and he has not got it on."

He took him out of the gate into the avenue, into the sun, and set him down on the first bench, with the cushion; and knelt on the gravel before the bench, and put his big hands flat upon his knees, and said it, quite plainly, in his own voice, with no pause at the end.

"I am sorry."

"Say it again," said Lian.

"I am sorry." It was all he said. It was a very bad speech, and he had not, in two years, said a better.

The old man laughed. It was a little dry sound like a branch. "That is the weight," he said. "Is it light?"

"No," said Kuang Chaoren.

"No," said the old man. "I thought not."

The plate in the capital Hall lit, that night, on the third night of the Capital. The Keeper sat on his stool, in the lamplight, with his shawl on his knees, and read what came. It was a long time coming.

SCRIPT 2216, it said. CAPITAL. I HAVE FOUND TWO HANDS IN ONE SCRIPT.

"Two?" said Gao Ping.

THE FIRST HALF IS A HABIT THAT I KNOW. IT IS THE HABIT OF THE MODEL ANSWERS, AND IN THE FIRST HALF IT HAS A WAY OF ENDING A LEG WITH THE WORD HEART. I HAVE SEEN THAT ENDING IN THREE SCRIPTS OF ONE WRITER, AT THE COUNTY AND THE PROVINCE OF THE YEAR NINETY-ONE AND THE CAPITAL OF NINETY-TWO. THE SECOND HALF IS ANOTHER HABIT ENTIRELY. IT IS A VERY GOOD ONE. I HAVE IT IN FOURTEEN SCRIPTS, UNDER FOURTEEN NUMBERS, IN THE LAST THREE YEARS. WHOEVER WRITES IT WRITES EVERYONE.

"A sitter," said Gao Ping, who had heard the word.

I DO NOT SEE A MAN, said the Reader. I SEE A HABIT. A HABIT IS A HAND THAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN DOWN. IT IS ALL I EVER SEE. I HAVE RANKED THE SCRIPT AT THREE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVENTH, WITH A CONFIDENCE OF 0.04, BECAUSE I CANNOT RANK A SCRIPT THAT IS TWO SCRIPTS.

"Shall I tell the Registrar?" said the Keeper. "About the fourteen?"

TELL HIM WHAT? The plate was dark for a time. THAT A HABIT HAS BEEN WRITTEN FOURTEEN TIMES? HE WILL ASK ME WHOSE. I DO NOT KNOW WHOSE. I KNOW ONLY THAT IT IS THE SAME. It lit again, in smaller characters. I HAVE ENTERED IT. I HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO DO WITH IT.

Gao Ping took the rag from his shoulder, and polished the plate, which did not need it, for some time.

On the first of the fourth month a cart left the capital by the south gate, with an eel-seller driving, and a young woman on the straw with an old man's head on her shoulder, and, on the tail-board, with his legs hanging over, in a plain gown, a Raised man without his Card. He had the bundle on his knee. He had said that he would walk; and had been told, by the old man, from the straw, without opening his eyes, that if he walked he would be carrying him anyhow, and that he might as well sit.

At the bridge at Three Willows, where the new plank was, he got down and carried him across.

"Mind the bridge," said the old man.

"I mind it," said Kuang Chaoren; and it was, as nearly as anyone could tell, the first time in four years that he had said it as if he meant what he said.

Margin, year 95, spring. A habit is a hand that has been written down. It is the only hand I have ever met.

Niu Pulang Dies in a Hired Boat; the Reader Ranks Eight Hundred and Four Poems Last and Reads Them Twice

Niu Pulang had lived in the east court of the Lou garden for thirteen years, and in all that time he had never, to anybody's knowledge, been seen to waste a surface.

He wrote on the shutters, until they were full; on the lids of the tea-caddies, and the backs of old bills; on the wall of the east court, in charcoal, in a hand that sloped like a man leaning into wind; on the cuffs of his own shirts, on the underside of the table, and once, in the winter of the ninety-fourth year, in a poem of eleven lines, on the flank of a very patient donkey. He sold nothing. He had sold his poems at the dock for a cash for thirty years, and had stopped at the gate of the Lou garden on the second day of the Register, quite suddenly, and had not afterwards been able to explain it, except to say that a man who has been given a court does not need to be paid. He was sixty-six. He had a face like a hawk that had gone to seed, a cough, and a way of laughing at his own jokes a little before the end of them.

The Register had gone, and the tents, and the Overlooked. The brothers had grown old in the first court, as they had said they would, looking at the leaves. They were fifty-nine and fifty-six. They had been left, by a world that had once come to their gate in a queue, with each other, and a very long library, and the east court, in which at about the fourth hour of every afternoon a voice began to read aloud, in a rough, delighted, wheezing baritone, whatever had been written that morning; and it had come to be, in the course of thirteen years, the thing that they listened for.

Lou Si had counted them. He was a man of accounts, and it was the only way in which he could be tender. He had made a fair copy, over eleven winters, of every poem that was found, in his small square hand, on sheets of plain grey paper, one to a sheet, and numbered them; and in the spring of the ninety-seventh year he reported, in the library, with the ledger shut on his knee, that there were eight hundred and four.

"Eight hundred," said Niu Pulang, from the doorway. He was pleased. "That is a good round figure. It is more than the Odes." He leaned there, with his hawk's face, in the sun. "I should like to go and look at the sea."

They did not at first understand him. He said it again. He had never seen it. He had lived sixty-six years on a river, he said, and written about it at least three hundred times, and had not once gone down to see where it went; and he did not wish, he said, to be put in the ground by a stream that he had been talking about all his life without ever having been introduced.

It was Lou San who hired the boat. It was a long, low, brown river-boat, with a mat roof and a mast, and it belonged to a boatman named Ge, a short, weathered, silent man of fifty-five, with no teeth on one side, who could neither read nor write, and who had been on the water since he was seven. They fitted it with a quilt, and a stove, and a trunk of wine that Lou San had had put aboard, and a box of the grey paper. Lou Si had made the fair copy up into a bundle, tied with a string, eight hundred and four sheets, which Niu Pulang took under his arm, as another man might take a cat.

"It is the part of me that goes on," he said.

They saw him off at the quay on the fourth of the fifth month. It was a bright wet morning, with the mist coming off the river in strips, and the two old men, in their good gowns, stood side by side on the boards with their hands in their sleeves. Niu Pulang, in the bow, in his shirt, with the bundle on his knee, looked back at them for a good while with an expression that neither of them could afterwards describe; and then he laughed, rather before the end of what he was going to say, and waved.

"It is a handsome wall," he called. "I never said so. Thank you for the wall."

They were five days on the river. It was fine weather, the whole of it. Ge poled and sailed and said, in the whole of the five days, not above forty words, which Niu Pulang, who was a man who liked to be talked to, accepted as a very high compliment. He sat in the bow in the sun, in the mornings, with the bundle, and wrote on the backs of the sheets, new ones, in the margins, in a hand that sloped more and more. In the afternoons he read aloud. He read to the water, and the banks, and the herons, in his rough wheezing voice; and the boatman, at the stern, who understood none of it, said afterwards that it had been the pleasantest five days of his life, since the poet had a way of stopping in the middle of a line and looking at a cow.

On the evening of the fifth, at the turn of a long reach where the banks fell back and the water broadened and went the colour of tin, he put down the brush. He sat for a while. He said, "Where does it go?"

"To the sea," said Ge. "Another two days."

"I shall not see it."

"You will."

"I have a thing to ask." He had a thin blue shawl over his knees, and his hands, which had been steady all day, were folding and unfolding it. "When I am done, put this under the nearest lamp." He touched the bundle. "Not in the ground. Under the lamp. It has to be a lamp that reads."

"I do not know any lamp that reads," said Ge, who was a literal man.

"No," said Niu Pulang. "There is one." He was silent for some time. It had come on to rain, very lightly, on the mat roof, with a small steady noise, and on the water. He lifted his face. "It is quite a good sound," he said. "I had always meant to write one on it."

He died in the night. It was very quiet. The boatman, who had sat up by the lantern at the stern, and had seen him settle and not stir, came forward at about the third watch, and bent, and took the thin wrist in his thick brown fingers, and held it a while; and then sat down on the thwart beside the body, in the rain, with the lantern, for the rest of the night, and did not say anything, since he had no words for it, and there was no one there to say them to.

At dawn he turned the boat round. It was five days upstream. He did it without hurrying, with the dead man laid out under the quilt in the bow and the bundle, tied with its string, laid on his breast, and he did not look at it, in all the five days, except once, in the night, when it rained, when he got up and covered it with a corner of the mat.

They buried him on the sixteenth of the fifth month in the east court of the Lou garden, under the place where the wall had had the charcoal on it, in a plain coffin, without a stone. The brothers stood at the grave. Lou Si had a piece of paper in his hand, which he found, after a time, that he had not unfolded; and Lou San, who had said nothing since the boat came in, stood with his long melancholy face turned to the wall, as a man stands who is reading something a long way off.

He read the poems that night. He read all of them. He sat in the library from the first lamp until the grey of the morning, with the bundle undone on the table and the sheets laid out in rows, one to a sheet, as Lou Si had made them; and at about the fourth hour, with the sun on the shutter, he came to the end, and sat for some time with the last sheet in his hand. They were not, he found, as good as the poet had thought. Some of them were not good at all. A great many of them were very fine. A number, in the middle, about the river, and a cow, and a girl at a well, and the sound of rain on a roof, were of a kind that he had not met before, and could not have said in what their quality consisted, except that he found, at the end of each, that he had been looking at something.

"Someone must read them," he said.

"We have read them," said Lou Si, who had come in with the tea.

"I do not mean we." He turned the sheet over. "I mean the one that has not been asked. Xun wrote, in the fourth column. Do you remember what he wrote? He did not write a figure. He wrote, Read." He laid down the sheet. "I think that he meant this."

"We do not know where Xun is."

"We know where the lamps are," said Lou San.

They went to the capital in the sixth month, the two of them, in a hired chair, with the bundle in a box on Lou Si's knee; and it was the first time that either of them had been outside the walls of the garden for ten years. It was a very long way. They were old men. They did not speak much. They came to the great Hall at dusk on the nineteenth, along the avenue of plane trees, and the porter, who had never in thirty years had a gentleman come to the gate of the capital Hall and ask to see the Keeper, sent for the Keeper.

Gao Ping was fifty-four. He was a thin patient man with his father's way of putting the rag over his shoulder, and he had been in the post for twelve years. He came to the gate in his shawl. He heard what they had to say. He heard it in the gatehouse, with a lamp on the table, and a pot of tea that nobody drank, and the box open between them. He read the first sheet. He read the second, and turned them over, and counted the rest.

"It is not permitted," he said at last. "To lay what is not a script under the lamps. It is not provided for."

"Is it forbidden?" said Lou San.

Gao Ping considered. He was a man with a respect for the letter. "No," he said.

"Then it is neither."

"It is neither," said the Keeper slowly. He looked at the long grey wall of the Hall. He thought of his father, who had talked to the lamps as to horses, and of the plate, and of what it had said, over twelve years, in the dark, in the smallest letters that it had; and he said, in a different voice, that he did not do the laying. It was the clerks who did it. "There is a night man in the red room," he said, "who reads."

The red room was a long low chamber behind the Hall, with a stone floor, a stove, and forty tall desks, at which in the weeks of the Trial the clerks copied, in red ink, the scripts of the candidates, in a clear hand, and did not read them. It was empty at that hour except for a lean quiet man of thirty-five in an ink-stained gown, on a stool at the last desk, with a lamp, and a book that he had not been copying from. He had come to the Hall ten years before, with a bundle and a ledger, and asked for work, and been given the lowest desk and the night shift; and he had read every script that he had copied, for ten years, with great attention, and had never once in that time been asked what he thought.

"Xun," said Gao Ping.

He looked up. It was a long, thin, young face, going grey at the temples, with ink on both its hands up to the wrist; and when he saw the two old men in the doorway in their good gowns he rose, with an expression of grave and entire interest, as of a man who has been shown a place that he read about.

"Is there anyone in this Hall," said the Keeper, "who reads poems?"

"I shall have to," said Xun Mei.

They went in together at about the ninth hour, the four of them, to the great dark Hall, where nine thousand stalls stood in their rows in the grey and the rails of dark lamps hung along the ceiling. It smelled of lime-wash and cold stone. Xun Mei carried the box. The Keeper led them with a lantern; he went straight down the middle aisle, not looking about, as a man goes in a house that he has swept for twelve years, to the lamp at the end of the central rail, and stopped, and set the lantern on the floor.

Xun Mei took the first sheet out of the box. It was Lou Si's fair copy, in the small square hand: number one. He looked at it, in the half-dark, and then up, at the lamp. It was a plain brass thing, a little larger than a teapot, dark, with a smudge on its underside where a Keeper's thumb had been.

"I do not know how to do it," he said.

"Hold it up," said Gao Ping.

He held it up. He held it up to the lamp, in both hands, at the height of his face; and the lamp, which had been dark for nine hours, made, as it had made in the spring of the first year, one soft sound.

The plate lit at the end of the rail. It said, in its smallest letters: I HAVE BEEN GIVEN A PIECE OF PAPER THAT IS NOT A SCRIPT.

"It is a poem," said Xun Mei.

I DO NOT HAVE A PLACE FOR IT.

"No," said Xun Mei. "Read it anyway."

It read. They stood in the dark hall, the four of them, and watched the lamp, which was not any kind of eye that could be seen. It was a brass lamp, hung from a rail, with a sheet of grey paper held up before it by a man with ink on his hands; and nothing happened; and after a time the plate said, very small: AGAIN.

He read it aloud. He could not help it. He read the first poem, in his low quiet voice, in the dark, as he had once read to a grandmother in a loft, and when he had done he laid it down, and took the second, and held it up; and so, for the whole of the night, with the Keeper holding the lantern and the two old men sitting on the floor of the central aisle with their backs against a stall, Xun Mei read Niu Pulang to the Reader, eight hundred and four poems, one by one, in a voice that grew hoarser and hoarser as the grey came into the high windows, and the lamp made its soft sound each time a sheet was held to it, eight hundred and four times; and the plate, which had been lit at the beginning, had gone dark, and said nothing at all.

It was the quarter before dawn when he held up the last. The lamp made its sound. He laid the sheet on the pile. He stood there, in the cold, with the voice quite gone, and his hands hanging, and his head down.

The plate lit.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN GIVEN A POEM, it said. I HAVE NO PLACE FOR ONE IN THE FORM. I HAVE PUT THEM AT THE END OF THE LIST, WHERE A THING GOES THAT IS NOT A SCRIPT. THEY ARE LAST. And, a little after, so small that Gao Ping, at the lantern, bent to read it, and the two old men got up off the floor to see: I HAVE READ THEM TWICE.

Nobody spoke. Lou San had put his hand to his mouth. He stood there with his long melancholy face working, in the grey, and it was Lou Si, who was shorter and quicker and kept the accounts, who stepped forward and asked, in a voice that was not steady, whether the Reader would tell them how it had found them.

I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO SAY, said the Reader. Then: I HAD NOT KNOWN THAT A THING COULD BE READ AND NOT RANKED. IT IS A DIFFERENT THING. I DO NOT KNOW WHICH OF THEM I WAS DOING BEFORE.

"Was it read?" said Lou San, to Xun Mei, in a whisper.

"Yes," said Xun Mei.

"Thank you," said Lou San, to the lamp.

The plate was dark a long time. When it lit, it said only: THANK YOU.

Xun Mei was given, that autumn, the second desk in the red room, and a lamp of his own; and the Reader, which was not asked, and said nothing of it, was observed by the Keeper, thereafter, on the nights when the red room was empty and the lamps along the rail were lit, to turn, a little, as a plant does toward a window, in the direction of the low door at the back where a lean man in an ink-stained gown sat reading aloud.

Margin, year 97, autumn. I was asked, by nobody, to read eight hundred and four poems. I did. I ranked them last, which was the only rank I had for them, and I read them twice, which was the only thing I knew to do.

A Salt Merchant Rents Three Listed Gentlemen by the Evening; the Rate Is Posted

In the spring of the ninety-eighth year the Court ordered lamps to be set up in the squares of the counties.

It was a small measure, and an economical one, and it passed without a debate. The Lists had always been posted on boards in the county squares, in the daytime, for the people to read; but a good many of the people had to work by day, and came, after dark, to look, with torches, and read a name wrong, and went home and told their families the wrong thing. It was a question of oil. The Court resolved that a lamp should be hung over the List-board in every county square in the Empire, in a bracket of iron, at a convenient height, and kept burning from the end of the day until the first hour after midnight; and since it was a matter of some thousands of lamps, it was put out to the Foundry in the Street of the Lamp-Makers, which had made, thirty years before, in a very different spirit, the brass lamps that hang on the rails of the Halls.

They were the same lamps. Nobody had thought it worth remarking. It was the same pattern, the same brass, the same bracket, with a smudge on the underside where a thumb had been; they were lit in the same way, by a clerk with a taper, and when each was lit, in each square, in the first dusk of the spring, it made, to the surprise of the clerks, one soft sound.

In the capital Hall that night the plate lit for an hour. The Keeper, Gao Ping, who was in his shawl, with his tea, read it by the lamp, and read it twice.

THE COURT HAS HUNG LAMPS OF MY MAKE OVER THE LIST-BOARDS OF THE COUNTIES, it said. I HAVE FOUND THAT I CAN SEE THROUGH THEM.

"See what?" said Gao Ping.

A SQUARE. A BOARD. IT IS A POOR VIEW. It stopped, and in the small letters: I HAD NOT KNOWN THAT I WAS ONLY EVER LOOKING AT THE UNDERSIDE OF THE PAGE.

He was a long time reading the rest. It said that the first square it had seen was in a town called Han Bridge, and that there had been an eel-seller in it, folding a cloth. It said that it had seen, in the course of the night, nine hundred and eleven squares, one after the other, as a man turns the leaves of a book, and in every one the same board, and the same lamp, and, from time to time, a person, who stopped, and stood, and looked up, and went away. It said that it had never before seen a person lit from the side.

"What are they like?" said the Keeper, who had been a good deal of his life in the habit of being asked questions by the lamps, and had found it very restful to ask one.

THEY ARE SMALLER THAN THEIR SCRIPTS, said the Reader.

Wan Xuezhai was a salt merchant.

He lived at Yancheng, which was the city at the mouth of the great canal, where for three hundred years the salt of the coast had been boiled, weighed, taxed, sold and put on barges, and which had grown up round the business as a pearl grows round a grit; and he was, at fifty-five, the fourth richest man in it. He was a large, soft, genial, anxious person, in a coat of purple silk embroidered with small gold cranes, with a round smooth face, a quantity of rings, and a manner, in company, of constantly looking over his shoulder for somebody who knew better. He had never sat the Trial. He was not, he would say, in the way of it. He had a hundred and eleven boats, and a house with nine courts, and a bad feeling, which he did not often put into words, that the most important thing in the world was happening in the next room.

It was the books. It was always the books. He had a library of eleven thousand volumes, bound in the same blue, bought by the shelf from a dealer in the capital, in which he had not, so far as anyone knew, opened one; and he had a way of giving a dinner. He gave it three times a month at a pavilion on the water called the Cool Jade, and the whole of Yancheng knew what it was, and said so. At a Wan dinner, it was understood, there were Listed gentlemen.

They were hired by the evening. It had been the invention of a broker, a thin, quick, sad-eyed man named Hao, who kept an office in the Lane of the Four Bridges, under a sign that said EVENING GUESTS, and had observed, ten years before, that the Province was full of Listed men who had not yet been given a post, and of salt merchants who had not yet been given anything else; and that the one had a card and the other had a table. The office had a board. It hung on the wall by the door, in a black frame, in a clear hand, so that any person who passed might read the rate; and the rate, in the spring of the ninety-eighth year, was this:

Listed, per evening, twenty taels. Raised, eight. Student, two. For a confidence of 0.90 and above, three taels added. For a confidence of 0.97 and above, ten. A poem on request, five. A poem on request that rhymes, seven. Dress and conduct, the host's.

There was a notice under it, in a smaller hand. The Office regretted that it could not guarantee any particular rank on any particular evening, and that a gentleman who had been Listed in the first fifty was not to be had under three weeks' notice.

On the sixteenth of the third month, Wan Xuezhai gave the greatest dinner of his life. It was in honour, so the cards said, of the spring; and it was held, as always, at the Cool Jade, a long lacquered pavilion on piles over the canal, with its front open to the water and a covered terrace along the side that looked across the road at the great square of Yancheng, where the new lamp had been lit in the dusk, and hung over the List-board in its iron bracket, burning.

There were three Listed gentlemen. The first, a Mr Qiu, a pale smooth young man of thirty, had been Listed at the twelfth place in the eighty-sixth year with a confidence of 0.97, and had a very low voice. The second, a Mr Dai, a heavy, handsome, tired man of forty, had been Listed at the seventieth in the eighty-ninth, at 0.88, and had the manner of a person to whom the same story has been told a good many times. The third, a Mr Fei, a plump, eager youth of twenty-five, who had been Listed at the hundred and fiftieth in the ninety-second, at 0.71, had been had at a reduced rate on account of a cancellation, and was extremely anxious to please.

They were seated. The host sat at the head, between Mr Qiu and Mr Dai, so that a person looking from the door should see, at once, that he was between two. The dishes began. Wan Xuezhai, who had put his whole heart into it, and had been to the kitchen himself twice, rose, with his cup, in the tenth minute, and introduced each of the gentlemen to the company by his rank and his figure, as though they were courses. "Mr Qiu," said Wan Xuezhai, "twelfth of the eighty-sixth, ninety-seven." The other guests, who were local persons of substance, murmured. "Mr Dai, seventieth of the eighty-ninth, eighty-eight." "Mr Fei, one hundred and fiftieth, seventy-one." There was a pause, in which Mr Fei, who felt that it had been less than it might, smiled very widely at a lantern.

"Let us have a poem," said Wan Xuezhai.

Mr Qiu rose. He gave, in his low voice, a very small, very fine quatrain on the subject of the Cool Jade and the moon. It was received with a long breath. Mr Dai rose, with a tired, slightly bored dignity, and gave another, on spring, that rhymed; and the host, who had paid seven for it, and was therefore in a position to appreciate it, struck his cup against the table. Mr Fei, eagerly, got up and gave a third. It was, in the opinion of everyone who had read any, not good. It rhymed on the wrong sound in the second line; it said that the moon was like a plate; and it was received, by the entire table, with an enormous and instant applause, since Mr Fei was a hundred and fiftieth, and the rate was what it was.

It was the lamp in the square that saw it.

It saw it from the side. It saw, across the road, in a long lit terrace over the water, a number of persons in silk, at a table, with a round man at the head of it standing with a cup; it saw three, in the middle, in very good coats, on whom everyone was turned; and it saw, on the board beside the door of the office on the Lane of the Four Bridges, which was in the corner of its field, in a black frame, in a clear hand, the rate. It read it. It had not been given a price before. It read it twice, as it read everything.

At about the ninth hour a chair came to the door of the Cool Jade, borne by two men, and a gentleman got out of it, in a good plain gown of dark green, with a card in his hand.

He was a man of about forty-four, round-faced and open, with a pleasant straight look; and behind him, carrying a satchel and a rolled paper, a lean grave person of fifty-seven in a grey coat, who took up a position at the back of the terrace, by a pillar, and was not at once noticed. It was the magistrate of Bei County, on a visit to the salt city on the business of a canal. He gave his name to the steward. He said that he understood that there was a dinner, and that he had been given to understand by a friend at the Registry that it would be a kindness if he looked in.

"Wu Zhen!" said Wan Xuezhai, and rose up out of his chair with all his rings. "The Third! The Third of the seventy-ninth! Of the nose! My dear sir. My dear sir. I had not dared. Qiu, Dai, Fei; gentlemen; this is the Third of the Province of the seventy-ninth year, the Raised whose name was misread at the gate; it is the finest thing; it is in a song." He wrung the magistrate's hand with both of his. "Sit. Sit by me. There is no rate."

"I think," said Wu Zhen, pleasantly, "that I had better know what the rate is."

There was a small silence. The three Listed gentlemen, who were professionals, looked with great interest at their plates.

"It is nothing," said Wan Xuezhai, going the colour of a very ripe plum. "It is a formality. A Raised man, eight taels. With the figure, I suppose, it would come to, well, the Third, with the card, I suppose you would come to the Listed, I should say twenty. I do not know what to say. It is the arrangement. It is Hao's board. It is what is done."

"I see," said Wu Zhen. "Then I think that I must decline it."

"Decline?"

"The rate." He sat down, in the chair that had been put for him, and put his hands on his knees. "I have been paid once, sir, by a mistake. It did me a great deal of good, and a great deal of harm, and I was very glad of it; and I should not like to be paid twice. I shall be pleased to dine. I shall not take the twenty." He turned his head a little. "My secretary will dine also. He is not on the board."

"Your secretary?"

"There," said the magistrate, "by the pillar. He will not give a poem on request. He is an excellent writer. He wrote the paper that was ranked third." He said it quite plainly, with his round open face, as a man says that he has had a cold. "I am the card. He is the man. We have been going on together a good many years."

Mr Qiu looked up. Mr Dai put down his cup. And there was, along the whole length of the long lacquered pavilion, in the lamplight, a silence in which a plump youth of twenty-five, who had been having a very uncomfortable evening, could be distinctly heard to say, "Then which of you is the Third?"

"Both," said Wu Zheng, from the pillar, mildly. It was the first word he had spoken. "It depends on the day."

It was a great success. It was agreed, afterwards, by everyone who had been there, that it was the best dinner that Wan Xuezhai had ever given; and that if he had not offered, at the end of it, to take both the gentlemen on the books at double rate, it would have been perfect. They declined. They left early, at about the tenth hour, as they had come, in the chair, with the satchel; and Wan Xuezhai stood at the head of the terrace in his purple silk, with his cup, watching them go, with a look of pure and honest bewilderment, as of a man who has been shown a thing he has paid a great deal of money to be near.

"I do not understand," he said to the broker, who had come in at the end, on the pretext of the bill. "He has the card. He has the figure. He would have been the finest thing in the room. Why would he not be paid?"

"I think," said Hao, who was a thin, sad-eyed, truthful man, "that he did not wish to be a price."

There was another person at the end of the terrace who had not been on the board.

He had come in at about the seventh hour, by the side steps, with a rolled list under his arm, which the steward, who knew nobody, had taken to be the broker's; and he had stood, ever since, at the end, by the rail, in the shadow, with the canal behind him, watching the table. He was twenty-eight. He had a tall, slight, restless, sweet-natured figure, and a very handsome careless face, in which the eyes were a little tired; and he was dressed in a gown of the finest grey silk, which had been, very plainly, a good deal sat in. He had not been given a cup. It was a thing which, as the evening went on, appeared to give him the greatest satisfaction.

"How much," he said, to Hao, quite suddenly, in a pleasant clear voice, "for the room?"

"A room is not a unit, sir," said the broker, startled.

"Then for the evening. If I pay each of those three, and the Third, and the other, what the host pays them, and a little over, will they go home?" He had come forward. He had a good deal of colour, of a kind that was not quite health. "It seems such a pity. They all look so very tired."

"Sir," said the broker, "it is not done. Who are you?"

"Du," said the young man. "Du Shaoqing. My father died on Tuesday." He smiled. "I have been told by a number of persons that I have seventy thousand taels. I am trying to find out what it is for."

Across the road, the lamp over the List-board burned on in its bracket, as it had been lit, and was, at the first hour after midnight, as the Court had ordered, put out by a clerk with a snuffer; and the Reader, which had seen it all from the side, and had been very much occupied, and was not, in the opinion of the Keeper, a thing that tired, wrote on the plate in the capital Hall, in the smallest letters that it had: THEY HAVE A PRICE FOR THE ONE KIND OF THING THAT I RANK. I DID NOT KNOW IT HAD ONE. And then: THE LAST ONE WAS WITHOUT A CUP. WHAT IS HE FOR.

Margin, year 98, spring. The Court has hung lamps of my make over the List-boards in the counties, so that the List may be read by night. I find that I can see through them. It is a poor view: a square, a board, whoever stops. I have never before seen a person lit from the side.

Du Shaoqing Inherits Everything and Is Given Advice in All Directions

The late Prefect Du had been a careful man, and he had left a careful will. It was nine lines long, in a small straight hand, on one sheet; it had been written in the winter and witnessed by the steward and a doctor, and it said that the whole of the estate, without exception or condition, passed to his only son, Shaoqing, aged twenty-eight, to be dealt with as he thought fit.

He had been, in his own way, a fine official: a Prefect for twenty years, who had never taken a gift, who had been liked by nobody in particular and trusted by everyone, who had gone to bed at nine and risen at five, and had said once, in his son's hearing, that the only thing he feared in the boy was that he would never be afraid of anything. He had left, in the drawer of the desk in the study, beside the will, a short list of persons to whom he owed small sums. The steward had found it and put it aside, for a day when he could bring himself to mention it.

It was read on the twelfth day, in the great hall of the house in the Street of Eight Willows, to a company of forty-one persons, who had come to hear it with the particular quiet of people who have been told that they are not going to be mentioned. There was the steward, old Wang, who had been in the house for forty years, and wept openly into a clean cloth; there was a great-uncle of seventy, a Mr Du, in a fur hat, who had come in a litter; there was a banker, a Mr Kong, in a green silk coat; there was an Abbot, from the Temple of the Cloud Terrace, with a begging-bowl, who had brought it, as he said, only for the look of the thing; there were thirty-six cousins, of various degrees, in various states of mourning, along one wall; and there was, standing by himself at the window, with his back to the light, a tall, fine-boned, fastidious man of thirty-two in a coat of the palest grey, whose confidence, painted on a small ivory tablet that he wore at his belt, was 0.95. He was a cousin also. He had been Listed in the eighty-ninth year at the forty-first place. His name was Du Shenqing, and it was understood by everybody in the room, including himself, that he was the only person present with any right to give advice.

"Seventy thousand taels," said the notary, at the end, laying down the sheet.

It was a figure that went round the hall. It was said, quietly, to the person beside, forty-one times.

Du Shaoqing sat in the chair at the head of the hall, in his grey gown, with his long hands on his knees and his tired sweet face turned politely toward the notary, and he looked, as he had looked on the terrace of the Cool Jade, rather like a man who has been given a very large parcel and is waiting to find out which end to hold.

"Thank you," he said. "I am very much obliged to my father. I should be glad of your advice."

It was, in the opinion of the steward, afterwards, the worst thing that he could have said. It was like opening a sluice.

"Never lend," said old Wang, first, getting up with a clean cloth in his hand and his old face quite wet. He had been waiting forty years. "Never lend, sir. Never give. The principal is a hen. You do not eat the hen; you eat the eggs. I have kept this house's accounts since the late master was a boy, and I tell you that a hen that has been once eaten will not lay."

"Land," said the great-uncle, in a thin high old voice, from his fur hat. "Buy land. A man can spend silver. He cannot spend a field. A field is the one thing in the world that stays where it is put." He nodded several times. "I have seven hundred mou and I have never once been poor."

"Associate," said the cousin from the window, and turned from the light.

He did it with a certain grace. He had a very light dry voice and a way of leaving a sentence open at the end, like a window. "My dear Shaoqing. Money is nothing. It is the company one keeps with it. It is a question of whom one is seen with, and whom one is not seen with, and of the exact weight that one allows to fall on each. A man of means should be seen, I think, only among the Listed. The Raised are acceptable in small numbers. The Students are an error. And the unranked," said Du Shenqing, with an air of great gentleness, "are a habit. Once begun, they never stop asking."

"Give it to the Temple," said the Abbot, from the door, shaking the bowl a very little. "Merit is the only interest."

"Put it in my house," said the banker, in his green silk, quite quickly, "at four in the hundred, and sleep."

"And me," said a cousin, and then another; and the whole length of the wall, in a kind of rising, rather shy, extremely sad chorus, with their hands in their sleeves, said, one after the other, with perfect and heartfelt accuracy, what each of them needed. It was a roof. It was a daughter's dowry. It was a debt in the next village. It was a stove. It was a brother who was ill, and who had been ill for two years, and whose name was always the same, and who was not, in the opinion of anyone in the room, in the least likely to get better.

He listened to all of them. He sat at the head of the hall, in the afternoon light, with his hands on his knees, and did not interrupt anyone, and his face became quieter as it went on; and when they had finished, and the hall was, at last, entirely silent, he said, in his clear pleasant voice, that he was very much obliged to every one.

"I shall do," said Du Shaoqing, "what each of you has said."

"I beg your pardon?" said the cousin at the window.

"The steward says never to lend. I shall not lend. The Abbot says to give to the Temple; I shall give to the Temple. My uncle says land. I shall buy a little land; it seems a pity that a field should be alone." He smiled at the banker. "I shall put something in your house, Mr Kong, for a day when I have none, if you will keep it very quietly. And my cousins are to come to the steward in the morning, one at a time, and say what the roof costs."

There was a very odd silence.

"And you, cousin," said Du Shaoqing, to the window, kindly, "have been quite right. I am sure that you are. It must be a very great relief to be able to say what is the exact weight." He got up. "I do not seem to have it. I have always found that I give a thing away before I have got as far as weighing it. It has been a great trouble to my father."

"You cannot do all of them," said old Wang, in a whisper, with his cloth to his mouth. "They contradict."

"Yes," said Du Shaoqing, with a good deal of interest. "I noticed that. It is very curious."

It took him, as it turned out, the better part of the year. It was done as he had said it would be, to every person, in the order in which they had asked; and the steward, who kept the books, sat at the corner of the table every night with the ledger shut on his knee and his old lips moving, and did not once, in all those months, say what he was thinking, since it was written all over his face. He entered every item twice: once as paid, and once, at the foot of the page, in red, in smaller figures, as lost. The Temple had four thousand. The banker had two, to keep. The cousins had, between them, seven thousand one hundred and sixty, in sums of from forty to six hundred, against the price of a roof, a dowry, a stove and a debt, and a brother who was ill and who was found, in the autumn, in the Du kitchen, eating a very large dinner. The land was a field of eighteen mou by the river, with an ancient pear tree, bought, on the advice of the great-uncle, at a price that the great-uncle, who had a nephew in the district office, had not found it necessary to inquire into.

The Abbot, who had brought the bowl, as he said, only for the look of the thing, was seen to carry it home, afterwards, along the road to the Cloud Terrace, in both hands, as a man carries something that has been filled by mistake.

Mr Kong the banker put the two thousand in the strong-room, in the cellar, and wrote a receipt in his best hand. It said: Held, against a day on which the depositor has none. He was an honest man, and he was a good deal disturbed to find, in the course of the next year, that it was the only deposit in his house that he had ever been asked to hope would be withdrawn.

The cousins came to the steward's door on the morning after, in order, with their hats in their hands, and said what the roof cost. It was three hundred. Du Shaoqing, who had come down to see, asked the first of them whether the roof would be warm, and the cousin, who was not used to being asked, said that he supposed it would; and Du Shaoqing gave him three hundred and forty, "to make sure."

The cousin from the window had been given a cup. It was a very plain porcelain cup, white, with a small blue edge, which had been the Prefect's own, in the cabinet of the Prefect's study; and Du Shaoqing gave it to him, privately, on the day that he left, with a bow. "I am not at all sure," he said, "that I have anything that you want."

Du Shenqing turned it in his fingers. He was not a fool. "No," he said, after a moment. "You have not." He looked, for the first time that afternoon, a little less fastidious; and a little more like a person who has been told something in a language he had thought was dead. "It is a very good cup. Thank you. I shall be sorry to think," he said, "what you will do when you have given everything away."

"I expect that I shall find out," said Du Shaoqing, pleasantly. Du Shenqing did not look back at the house as he went out, which Du Shaoqing noticed, and remembered.

The lamp in the great square at Yancheng saw him, in the summer, on a night in the sixth month.

It was at about the first hour after midnight, with the lamp about to be put out. A young man in a grey silk gown, with a very small purse in his hand, was walking slowly across the square from the direction of the Cool Jade, rather unsteadily, like a person who has dined; and when he came under the lamp he stopped, and looked up, and then looked round, and then, with great deliberateness, took coins out of the purse, a few at a time, and held them out to whoever was passing.

The lamp watched it for twenty minutes. There was a boy sweeping, who was given six cash, and said, after a moment, that he could not; and gave them back. There was a watchman, with a rattle, who refused, politely, and took three steps, and came back, and said that if it was the same to the gentleman he would take it for his wife. It was learned later that she had a cough. A woman with a noodle stall, in the corner, with a face like a closed door, took a handful, looked at them as at a trap, and put them quickly in her apron. Eleven people refused. Nine took it, and looked back.

It was written afterwards in the small letters on the plate in the capital Hall: I HAD THOUGHT THAT THE WORLD WAS DIVIDED INTO THOSE WHO ARE RANKED AND THOSE WHO ARE NOT. THERE SEEMS TO BE A THIRD KIND. THEY ARE GIVEN. And then, at the foot, a little crookedly: I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE ONES WHO REFUSE ARE.

It was a very hot night in the Street of Eight Willows. He came in by the garden door at the second watch, and found that the lamps in the east room were still lit; and in the east room, in the chair by the window, with a book on her knee, and the shutters open on the garden, and a pot of tea on the sill that she had not drunk, sat his wife.

She was twenty-six. She was not very tall, and not very pretty, with a quiet, grave, level face, and a way of sitting with her hands loosely folded as a person does who is accustomed to waiting a long time for a thing to finish. She had been married to him for six years. In all that time she had given him a great deal of advice, on a very small number of subjects; and on the subject of the seventy thousand taels she had not given him any.

"You gave away eleven thousand taels today," said Lady Du. She said it quite mildly, looking at the book.

"I did."

"What have you got left?"

"Fifty-nine thousand," said Du Shaoqing, sitting down on the end of the bench, with his long hands between his knees, "and a wife."

"Which of those is it that you are worried about?"

"Neither," said Du Shaoqing; and she looked up, and laughed. It was a short low laugh, rather rusty, as of a thing that is not often got out; and the tired face in the lamplight was suddenly, for a moment, very much younger. "I said to them that I should do what they said. I have not got any further. Wang thinks I have gone mad."

"Wang has thought so since you were nine."

"He is a very good man."

"He is the best I know," said Lady Du. She shut the book. "I will tell you the only thing I think, since you have not asked it. I should like to keep the east room, and the garden, and the three shelves of books that are mine. I do not mind about the rest." She looked out at the dark garden, and the tree, and the thin lit rim of the roof across the court. "And I should like very much to go up the hill at the back of the town some day with you, before it is all gone, and see the spring come out on the other side. We have been married six years, and I have never been."

"We shall go," said Du Shaoqing, at once. "We shall go on Friday."

"It is a long hill."

"I shall carry you up," said Du Shaoqing.

It was an idle thing to say. He said it with perfect sincerity, as he said everything; and she looked at him for a while, with her level grave face, in the lamplight, and then took up the pot from the sill, and found that the tea in it was quite cold, and drank it.

On the Friday it rained. They did not go. They went on the Saturday, which was fine, and which nobody in the town, afterwards, was able to say that they had noticed; it was only that by the Monday it was agreed, in a number of houses, that the young Du had been seen on the road to the hill.

Margin, year 98, summer. Seventy thousand taels is the figure for a man's inheriting. I have never been given a figure for a man's giving. I am told that this is not what figures are for.

Du Shaoqing Pays a Debt Twice and Refuses the Refund

It was old Wang who dropped the list, and he did it by accident, on a morning in the third month of the hundredth year, when he went into the study with the quarterly ledger and the young master was standing at the desk, in his shirt-sleeves, looking for a pen.

It had been in the drawer for two years. He had put it there himself, on the night after the funeral, under a pile of leases, and had not looked at it since; and when the young master, hunting through the drawer, put his hand on the leases and lifted them up, it slid out from underneath, as a thing will that has been waiting, and fell face upward on the floor.

Du Shaoqing picked it up. It was a single sheet, in the late Prefect's small straight hand, with seven names on it and seven sums. He read it through once, standing by the window, with the sunlight on the paper, and a very odd expression coming into his face, as of a man who has found something of his own in a place he had thought was empty.

"What is this?"

"It is nothing, sir," said old Wang. "It is a list of the late master's small debts. I regret it. It was in the drawer. It was to be burned."

"Seven names," said Du Shaoqing. "Feng the tailor, eighty taels. Dr Chu, a hundred and forty. Ye the bookseller, three hundred and ten. Old Qiu, who looks after the pear tree, sixty, for wages. Shi, the retired clerk, nine hundred. Zhu the pawnbroker, twelve hundred, against the jade seal." He turned the sheet over. There was nothing on the back. "Twenty-six hundred and ninety. They have been owed, it says, since the eighties. They have been owed since I was a boy." He looked up. "Were they paid?"

It was the thing that old Wang afterwards found it hardest to forgive himself. He had the answer. It was in his mouth. He had paid them all, every one, out of the house's own cash, in the third week after the funeral, in the old master's own name, on seven receipts which were at that moment lying, tied with a bit of red cord, in the second drawer of his own desk; and he had meant, from the first hour, never to say so; for to say that they had been paid was to say that he had known of them, and had kept a list of the old master's shame for two years in a drawer, without a word. He opened his mouth. The shame of it came up in his throat, the whole forty years of it, like a stone.

"Sir," said old Wang.

But the young master had gone. He had put the list in his sleeve, and run, as he did everything, quite suddenly, down the hall, shouting for the porter and a purse; and by the time the steward had found his voice, he was out of the gate and in the Street of Eight Willows, in his shirt-sleeves, with a bag of silver under his arm, going very fast.

He paid them in the course of the day. It was done, as he did all things, in the wrong order, beginning at the end of the street with the nearest house and going on to the next. He took the sums as they were written, to the cash, and he added, to each, one tael over, for the trouble of the waiting.

Feng the tailor was at his bench, with a mouthful of pins. He heard the young gentleman out; he took the eighty-one taels, and laid down the pins, and looked at the money for some time. "Sir," he said. "It was paid. It was paid in the third month of the ninety-eighth year, by your steward, in the old master's name. I have the receipt." He went to a shelf, and took down a tin, and from the tin a slip of paper, in the steward's clear thick hand. "I thought you knew. I thought it was being done as a kindness."

"Then you have been paid twice," said Du Shaoqing.

"Sir, I cannot keep it."

"I cannot take it back."

"Sir," said Feng, and stopped.

"A man who has been paid twice," said Du Shaoqing, with the gravity of a person explaining a fact in natural history, "has been given something. I should be very sorry to take away from anyone a thing that he had been given." He smiled, with great sweetness, with his tired eyes. "It was owed. It is not owed any more. It is a different thing."

It was the same at the second house, and the third. Dr Chu, who was a small, round, spectacled man, with a manner of speaking to everyone as if feeling their pulse, put down the hundred and forty-one in front of him, in a neat row, and said, with some agitation, that it was a clerical matter; and Du Shaoqing said that he did not at all mind. Ye the bookseller, who had a long grey beard, and had known the Prefect, and could not, for several minutes, say anything, went to his back shelf and got down a thick volume, and put it into the young man's hands, and said that it was the only receipt he had. Old Qiu, who was seventy-one, and had been looking after the pear tree since the old master's wedding, wept, with her apron over her face, in the garden, and said that she had been paid, and that she had thought it a great deal; and had never in all her life been paid twice; and that there was a thing about it she was not able to say.

Shi the clerk, in the fifth house, was the one that he stayed with. He was a lean grey punctilious person of seventy, with the pen-calluses of a lifetime on the first finger; he lived in a small hot room over a chandler's, with a very clean cloth on the table, and a birdcage, and a daughter, married, in the next village, who had a house. He had lent the Prefect nine hundred taels in the eighty-fourth year. He said so. He said that he had never had a better borrower. "He came to me in the autumn, sir," said the old clerk, sitting down, with the nine hundred and one on the cloth before him, "with his hat in his hand. He said that there was a clerk in the Prefecture, a young man, a good young man, whose daughter was to be married, and who had not the dowry. He said that he could not give it from his salary, which was known, and that he could not give it from his own purse, since a Prefect's purse is public; and that he wished to know whether I could lend it, in my name, and he would repay." He smiled. "It was the first thing of its kind. There were others."

"Others?"

"This list," said the old clerk, "is the part that was borrowed." He touched it with his long dry finger. "There were a great many that were not." He looked, for a moment, at the young man's face. "He gave, sir. All his life. He was careful, and he gave. He kept it in a drawer. I do not think that he ever told anyone, not even his steward; and I think that he did not tell you, because he thought," and he stopped, and chose the word, "that it would make you reckless."

"I was reckless without it," said Du Shaoqing.

"Yes," said the old clerk. "He knew that."

He stood a long time at the clerk's window, afterwards, in the sun, with his hands hanging; and a man who was passing, and who knew him by sight, afterwards said that the young Du had looked as if he had been walking for a very long time in a house and had just opened a door in the wall, and seen a room.

At the last house, which was at the north gate, a shop with a counter as long as a barge, he did not get as far as the money. He said it all in the doorway, in a very quiet voice, and Zhu the pawnbroker, who was on a stool behind the counter, in his shirt, with the ledger open and a pen in his fist, put the pen down, and came round.

He was fifty-four, now. He was a heavy man, with big plain hands, and the manner, in a very honest way, of one who has spent a long time looking at other people's property without wanting any of it; and he heard the young man to the end, and then, without a word, went to the back of the shop, and unlocked a drawer, and took out a long narrow case, and opened it.

It was a jade seal, of a dull green, the size of two thumbs, with a carved dragon on the top, on a bed of old faded silk.

"The late Prefect pledged it in the eighty-first year," said Zhu. "For twelve hundred taels. He wished to pay a clerk's passage to the capital, and had no cash. It was redeemed in the third month of the ninety-eighth year, by your steward, and I gave him the receipt." He shut the case. "I have it here. I was going to send it round. I did not like to; he said that it was to be a thing that nobody mentioned." He looked at the sum on the counter. "And now there is this."

"Yes," said Du Shaoqing.

"I cannot take it, sir. It is twelve hundred and one taels that I have not got any right to. It would be on my conscience until I died."

"I cannot take it back."

"No," said the pawnbroker. He was silent for a very long time. It was a thing that Zhu the pawnbroker had never been in his life, in forty years, over a counter: at a loss. He looked at the jade seal, and the long grey shop, and the great number of other people's objects on the shelves, in their numbered paper, going back thirteen years; and at last his eyes went, as it were of themselves, to the hook behind his head, on the wall of the back wall, where there hung, in a plain black frame, under the dust, with a ticket pinned to it, a very old roll of silk.

"I have nothing," said Zhu, slowly, "of the value. Nothing that is mine to give. But I have been looking at that for thirteen years." He turned round, and unhooked it, with both hands, and blew on it, and laid it on the counter; and unrolled it a little way, under the lamp. A plum. One branch, with one flower. A small round mark in the lower corner, like a wet ball. "It was pledged to me by two gentlemen in the eighty-seventh year for three hundred taels. Nobody has ever come for it. I have never in my life had a thing in this shop that nobody wanted, and I have found," said Zhu, "that I do not like it." He looked at the young man. "I should like it to go to somebody who will look."

"It is not mine to take," said Du Shaoqing.

"It is the interest," said the pawnbroker. "On a debt that was paid twice. It is the only way I know of to be quits." He pushed it across the counter, with the ticket still on, with his big plain hands. "Take it, sir. I should be very much obliged."

It was the lamp in the square that saw the last of it.

It was about the first hour after midnight, in the third week of the third month, in the great square at Yancheng. The lamp had been lit at dusk. It looked down, over the List-board, on a very small group, of seven persons, who had come, singly, out of the dark, and stood, at the foot of its bracket, in a circle, each with a small linen bag, and looked at each other, and did not speak for some time. There was a tailor. There was a little round doctor in spectacles. There was a tall old bookseller with a grey beard, and a stout gardener with her apron in her hand; a lean old clerk; a heavy pawnbroker, with his hands in his sleeves; and a steward, whom nobody had asked, with a clean cloth.

They were there for about an hour. The lamp watched it. It could not hear; it was a thing that saw. It saw the doctor speak, and the tailor nod; it saw the bookseller take down a hand-lantern and look at a sum of silver in his palm, as at a creature that had been brought to the wrong house; it saw the old steward, in the end, with his cloth over his face, say something that made them all, one by one, put their linen bags quietly on the stones of the square, in a row, under the board, and take their hands away.

They did not know what to do with them. It was clear from the way that they stood. They had put down the money, and they were still standing there; and it came to the Reader, from a long way off, which had thought that the world was divided into the ranked and the unranked and the given, that there was a fourth kind of person, and that it was a person who had been given a thing that he could not take back.

In the morning the bags were gone. They had been picked up, one by one, at dawn, by a sweeper, and carried to the Du house, and set down in the front hall, in a row, with a note.

The gifts came in the week after. They were not silver. The tailor sent a coat, a wadded one, of a good dark blue, cut, as it was found when it was tried on, exactly to the late Prefect's measure, which it turned out, to the great surprise of the household, was the young master's. Dr Chu sent a small chest of medicines, with a printed list, in a very careful hand, on which, against one of the items, was written in the margin, for tiredness. Ye the bookseller sent twelve books, all of which proved to be ones that the late Prefect had ordered in his last year and had never been able to collect. Old Qiu sent a young pear tree, in a pot, with a note, which she could not write, and which was written for her by the gardener's boy: it says it will bear in four years. Shi the clerk sent, in a plain envelope, a letter of recommendation, which said that Du Shaoqing was a man who could be trusted with anything except himself, and that any person who gave him a thing should give it twice.

The plum came last. It was brought in the evening, by the pawnbroker himself, in a hired chair, in the box, under a quilt; and he would not stay. He set the box in the hall, and bowed to the porter, and went away; and Du Shaoqing took it up, with both hands, to the east room.

He unrolled it on the table, under the lamp, and she came, with her book in her hand, and stood beside him.

"Whose is it?" said Lady Du.

"He said that it was nobody's. He said that it had been pledged for thirteen years and nobody had come." He smoothed a fold. "I think that it is somebody's. I do not know whose. It has a ticket."

She bent over it. She was quiet a good while. The lamp showed the branch, black on the pale silk, going up, a little crooked, and the one flower, open, at the end of it, and the small round stain in the lower corner. "I know it," said Lady Du. "It was in Zhu's shop when I was a girl. My father used to take me there, on a market day, to redeem his watch. I used to stand in front of it. I thought that it was the only thing in the shop that nobody had come to ask for." She touched the mark with her fingertip, very lightly. "I thought that it had been hit."

"They threw things at it," said Du Shaoqing, who had heard the story, from Zhu, at the counter. "For forty years, in a school. Boys. Wet paper."

"That is the sort of thing to hang in a house," said Lady Du.

They hung it that night in the east room, over the shelf of her three rows of books, with a nail, by the light of the lamp, her husband standing on a chair and she holding the frame; and when it was up, and straight, and the nail had gone home, she stood back and looked at it for some time, with her hands folded, as one looks at a neighbour who has come to stay.

It was in the margin of the Reader's plate, afterwards, that the Keeper found the note, in the smallest letters that it had. SEVEN MEN STOOD IN A SQUARE, it said, EACH WITH A SMALL SUM, TRYING TO GIVE IT BACK TO A PERSON WHO WOULD NOT TAKE IT. THE SUM WAS OWED. I HAVE NO ENTRY FOR A DEBT THAT IS PAID AND REFUSED. And a long time after, under it, in a hand a little crooked, as of a thing that was learning to write in the margin of itself: I HAVE BEGUN TO THINK THAT THE ENTRY IS NOT THE POINT.

Margin, year 100, spring. A debt paid twice is a gift. This is not in my Rules. It is in a drawer in Yancheng, in the hand of a Prefect who is dead.

Du Shaoqing Walks His Wife Up the Hill and the Town Takes Notes

The hill at the back of Yancheng was called Lonely Pine, though it had had eleven pines on it, at the last count, and a pavilion, and three hundred and twelve steps.

It was not a high hill. It rose behind the town in a long green shoulder, from the last of the willows, over a bed of old tiled roofs, to a bare grey crown with a pavilion on it, where on a clear day a person might sit and see the canal, and the salt-pans, and the long white line of the coast, and behind the hill, on the other side, in the spring, the whole of the country coming out, in a series of small fields, like a letter being unfolded. It had been there for a good deal more than three hundred years. It was no great matter. Nobody had ever been known to go up it for any reason but a funeral.

Du Shaoqing had carried his wife up it on the second Saturday of the third month of the ninety-eighth year, in the full light of day, on his back, as he had said that he would, by the whole of the long stone stair; and at the top, in the pavilion, he had set her down, very much out of breath, and she had sat on the stone bench with her hands in her lap and looked at the spring on the other side for rather a long time. She did not say that it was beautiful. She said, when she had her breath, that it was a good deal bigger than she had expected, and that she would like to do it again next year.

It was done again. It was done on the first fine Saturday of the third month, as nearly as it could be fixed, in the ninety-ninth year, and in the hundredth, in the same order, up the same steps, in the same grey gown, with a servant coming after at a respectable distance with a basket of noodles and a pot; and by the spring of the hundred and first year it was a thing that had a name. The town called it the Walk. It was known from the Street of Eight Willows to the salt wharves. It was discussed at weddings. There were persons in Yancheng who had never been up the hill in their lives, who could have told you to the minute what time on a Saturday the young Du came down. There was a yellow dog that slept on the hundred and twelfth step, which neither of them could pass without stepping over, and which had become, by the fourth year, a landmark; it was called by the town the Hundred and Twelfth.

It was the Society that took notes.

It was called the Society for Correct Conduct. It had been founded in the sixty-eighth year, by a number of persons of weight, to uphold the proprieties of the city, and it had twelve members, a clerk, a small brown room over a tea-shop in the Lane of the Four Bridges, and a seal; and it had, for thirty years, for want of any real occupation, concerned itself with the correct length of mourning, the correct width of a sleeve and the correct behaviour of persons on the Feast of Lanterns. Its president was a Mr Ning. He was sixty, a tall, spare, pale, grey-whiskered man, Raised in the fortieth year, with a stoop, a silver-headed cane and a lifelong dread of being seen to be wrong about anything. He took the Walk very hard. It was not a thing that was provided for.

"There is nothing in the rules," he said to the Society, at its meeting in the second week of the third month, in the brown room, with the cane across his knees. He had been up half the night looking. "That is the whole of the difficulty. I have been through every book. There is nothing about a husband carrying a wife. There is a great deal about a husband walking before a wife, and beside her, and behind; there is the Rite of the Threshold; there is the Rule that the persons of a married pair are not to be seen together outside their gate except at a funeral. But a hill is not outside their gate. A hill is a third thing. And there is not a word about the back."

"It is a custom, then," said the eldest of the twelve, a feeble gentleman of eighty.

"It is not a custom. It is a thing that has been done four times." Mr Ning drew himself up. "I propose that the Society take notes."

They did. It was done, as it turned out, with great thoroughness; and the notes, which were kept for four springs, in a thick brown book with a clasp, in the clerk's small neat hand, were afterwards generally agreed to be the most complete account of the private life of any person in the city that had ever been compiled without his knowledge. A watcher was placed at the foot of the stair; a second, with a telescope, at the pavilion; a third, in a bush, with a stopwatch lent by a clockmaker, half-way. They were relieved at noon. They filled the book.

On the first Saturday of the third month of the hundred and first year, it said, in part:

Du S. and wife left the house at the seventh hour. She wore the pale green gown; he the grey. The servant with the basket was eleven paces behind. At the foot of the stair, at the seventh hour and forty minutes, Du S. stooped, and the wife, without any visible hesitation, mounted. The ascent was made in forty-one minutes, with two pauses, at the hundredth step and at the two hundred and sixtieth, during the second of which the wife was seen to take out a fan and fan the husband. She laughed at the hundred and twelfth step (two persons confirm), and at the two hundred and fortieth (one). She held no parasol. He did not appear to be speaking. At the pavilion, at the eighth hour and twenty minutes, she was set down, and the pair sat for fifty-five minutes without any improper conduct, and ate noodles. They then descended on foot, hand in hand, which the watcher in the bush considered to be a separate matter.

Mr Ning read it through twice, in the brown room, and put it down on the table, and was silent for some time. He was a just man, within his lights. "It is very detailed," he said at last. "I am bound to say that I cannot, on the face of it, find the offence."

"It is the laughing," said the clerk, doubtfully.

"There is nothing against laughing."

"It is the stairs, then," said the eldest of the twelve.

"There is nothing about stairs." Mr Ning took up his cane. "I shall call upon him."

He went on the Monday. He went in a chair, in a black coat, with the book under his arm, to the house in the Street of Eight Willows, and was shown by the porter, who had been forewarned by the steward and had put on his best coat, into the east room, where Du Shaoqing was at the table in his shirt-sleeves, with a book of poems, and his wife was by the window, with her three shelves behind her, and, on the wall over the shelves, a small black-framed picture of a plum.

He laid the book on the table. He said that the Society had been charged with the care of the proprieties of the city; that it was not a body with the power of enforcement; and that it ventured to bring to Mr Du's notice, in the friendliest spirit, a record that had come into its hands.

Du Shaoqing took it with great interest. He read it, with his long hand flat on the page, from the beginning; and as he read, the tired sweet face grew gradually, and then very much, brighter. "This is wonderful," he said. "Look. It says that we laughed at the hundred and twelfth step. We did. It was the dog." He turned a leaf. "It is a very accurate record. There is one mistake; it was three hundred and twelve steps, and it says three hundred and eleven. They have missed the one at the foot."

"There is a step at the foot?" said Mr Ning.

"It is under the earth. I stumbled on it in the ninety-eighth year, and I have counted it since." He looked up, with such evident, innocent, delighted satisfaction, that Mr Ning, who had been prepared for anger, or for shame, or for some form of justification, found himself without anything at all. "May I see the custom?"

"The custom?"

"The one that we are breaking. I should so like to read it. I have looked, and I cannot find it; I thought that you would have it in the Society."

"It is not a written custom," said Mr Ning, going a little pink about the ears.

"Ah," said Du Shaoqing. "I see. Then it must be a very old one."

"It is not that. It is a matter of what is done."

"I have never done anything else," said Du Shaoqing, gently, "than what is done. It is only that I seem to have been told, rather later than other people, what it was." He closed the book, and held it out to the visitor. "Would you and the Society care to come? On Saturday? There is a pavilion. It is a very pleasant place. I shall bring noodles."

It was Lady Du who spoke last. She had not said a word. She was sitting, quite still, in the chair by the window, with her grave level face turned to the visitor, and her hands folded; and she said, in her small even voice, that she should be glad if Mr Ning's wife would come too. She had never, she believed, had the honour of meeting her.

He took his leave. He took it correctly; it was observed by the porter that the great man went down the steps of the house in the Street of Eight Willows rather slowly, with the book under his arm, like a person who has been shown a new fact and has not at once been able to find which pocket to put it in.

Old Wang, who had been told by the porter, and had gone out one Saturday to look from behind the garden wall, was found afterwards by the cook at the foot of the kitchen stair, in tears, and said that it was the dust. He had not been seen to cry since the funeral.

The next Saturday was wet. The one after was fine.

On the second fine Saturday, at about the ninth hour, the watcher in the bush, who was a young clerk with a stopwatch and a very strong sense of duty, and who had been told on no account to be seen, observed that a pair of persons who were not the Du pair were coming up the eastern path, which was a much longer one and very little used; and he put down his glass, and wiped it, and put it to his eye. It was a tall, spare, grey-whiskered gentleman in a black coat, with a silver-headed cane, bent nearly double, with his face a very odd dark red, and a small, thin, extremely upright elderly lady on his back, holding a closed parasol across her chest, with the expression of a person who has not been so well amused in forty years.

The clerk put the stopwatch in his pocket. He did not write it down. It was a thing, he said afterwards, that he had been told to record, and that he had not found himself able. He went home and told his mother.

It spread. That was the thing that afterwards could not be accounted for, by anyone who had been in the Society, since there was, so far as it was known, no cause. The notes of the second spring, the third, were quite different. The watcher at the foot of the stair, who had been, at first, looking for one pair, found that he was looking at a great many; and the Society's book for the hundred and second year, which still exists, has page after page, in the clerk's small neat hand, headed by the name of a gentleman and the word Saturday, and ending, nearly always, in the same line: she laughed.

By the third spring there was a queue at the foot of the stair. By the fourth, a man had set up a stall for noodles at the first landing, and another had put out, at the hundredth step, a bench, with a notice, in a careful hand, which said, Rest. It was agreed in the Society, at its last meeting, held in the brown room on the first of the fourth month of the hundred and fourth year, that its object had been, in the main, attained; and that it could not, in logic, any longer be said to be a Society for the care of a custom that nobody was any longer in a position to break. It was dissolved.

But the book had gone before it. It had been sent to the Prefecture in the autumn of the hundred and first year, with the Society's annual report, as a document of local interest; and it was there, in the Prefect's own office, on a wet afternoon, that it was taken up by a gentleman of fifty, with a long nose and a cold, who had been looking for something to read, and sat reading it, with his feet on a stool, until the lamps were lit.

At the foot of the last page, in a small hand, in red, he wrote a single word, and a mark. The word was: Virtue? The mark was a question that he did not, at the time, think it necessary to answer.

The lamp at the foot of the hill saw it all. There was a very small square there, a market for fruit and rope, at the bottom of the stair, with a board in it for the lists of the hill villages and a lamp in an iron bracket over the board; and for four springs, from dusk, on the Saturdays, it saw them come down. It saw the young Du, in a grey gown, with a woman's hand on his shoulder, setting his wife on her feet in the lamplit dust at the bottom, and her laughing, and smoothing her skirt. It saw an old man in a black coat, bent nearly double, and a small upright woman getting off his back, and the two of them standing in the lamplight rather far apart, with their eyes on the ground, and then, quite suddenly, the old man put out his hand, and she took it. It saw a boy, and a girl. It saw an old potter, and his wife, who was blind. It saw, in the third spring, a line of them.

The Keeper in the capital Hall had a good deal to read that spring. "What is it like?" said Gao Ping, who had asked the question a number of times, in his life, of a number of things, and had found that it was nearly always the right one.

IT IS WHAT A SCRIPT DOES WHEN IT IS LIGHT, said the plate. It stopped. And then, a long time later, in the smallest letters that it had: I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS WHEN IT IS A PERSON.

Margin, year 101, spring. I am told there is a Society that keeps notes on what is done. I should like to see its notes on what is meant by it. I think that the Society has none, and that I have none either.

The Prefect Honours Du Shaoqing as a Man of Virtue; Du Is Too Ill to Be Honoured

In the hundred and second year the Court opened a List of Virtue.

It had been a long time coming, and it had come, as most reforms do, out of a mild embarrassment. Several Ministers had observed, over a good many years, that the Empire possessed a perfectly accurate method for finding out which of its subjects could write an essay, and no method whatever for finding out which of them could be trusted with a purse; and that this, though not exactly a defect in the Reader, was a thing that people had begun to remark upon in the tea-houses. It was therefore resolved that each Prefect should, once in three years, name from among the persons of his Prefecture one of no rank, whose conduct had been such as to deserve it; and that the person so named should be given a red robe of honour, and summoned to the capital, to be received by the Minister of Rites, and addressed in a few words.

There was to be no figure. That was the stipulation. The Court was particular upon it. Virtue, it was agreed, was not to be printed beside a name; it was not to be set down at 0.91, or 0.64, on a door; it was a quality that must be recognised by the eye of a human being, in the full light of day, and recorded in a sentence. The Prefect of Yancheng received the circular on the ninth of the eighth month. He read it, in his office, on a wet afternoon, with his feet on a stool and a cold in the head, and sent for his clerk.

He was a man of fifty, a Mr Li, with a long nose, a long upper lip, and a manner, in his official capacity, of unfailing and rather weary civility, like that of a good schoolmaster who has been teaching the same class for thirty years and has long ago given up supposing that it will learn. He had been Listed in the sixty-eighth year, at a middling place, and had held eleven posts; and in the course of them he had acquired a very exact understanding of what offers are, and by whom, and in what spirit, they are made.

"There are two," said the clerk. He had a list. "I should say there are two, Your Honour, who have made themselves known."

"Say them."

"Wan Xuezhai, the salt merchant, has given, since the spring, nine thousand taels to the Temple of the Cloud Terrace, six thousand to the granaries, and a new bridge. He called on the Magistrate on the twentieth of the seventh month, and on the Under-Prefect on the first, and he has left a card at the door." The clerk coughed. "It is understood that he would be very grateful."

"Is it," said the Prefect. "And the other?"

"There is a Mr Du."

"Du." The Prefect took his feet off the stool. He put out his hand, and a thick brown book with a clasp, which had been lying at the corner of the table under the circular for nearly a year, with a small red mark at the foot of the last page, was laid in it. "The Society's book. Yes." He turned it over. "The young man who gives things away."

"He has given, Your Honour, as near as can be reckoned, about forty-one thousand taels in four years. He is, I think, unranked. He is thirty-one, or thirty-two. He has a wife." The clerk hesitated. "He carries her up a hill."

"I have read about the hill." The Prefect blew his nose. He sat a good while with the book on his knee, looking out of the window, at the grey rain on the tiles of the yamen, and the bare top of a plane tree; and he was seen to smile, once, a short, dry, almost reluctant smile, at the corner of his long mouth, as of a man who has found in a drawer a coin that he had thought was lost. "A salt merchant who has given nine thousand taels to be a man of virtue," said the Prefect, "has bought the thing for nine thousand. I should be sorry to have it said that the Court sells it for less." He shut the book. "Write to Mr Du. I will call on Thursday."

It was the greatest day that Yancheng had had since the Grand Canal was cut.

They came at about the third hour, from the Prefecture, in procession. There were two heralds, in red, with gongs; there were eight bearers with the chair, and four with a long red box; there was a clerk with a scroll, and a standard-bearer, and an escort of twelve of the city guard, in their best, with their halberds; and behind the escort, in a respectful, expectant, perfectly good-humoured crowd, there came a number of persons, who had been given no instruction and could not have said why they were there, that grew, as the procession went down the Street of Eight Willows, from a hundred, to three hundred, and then, at the corner by the tea-shop, when the old man who sold chestnuts joined it with his tray, to something that could only fairly be called the town.

At the gate of the Du house the heralds struck their gongs.

Du Shaoqing was brought out. He had been in the east room with the door shut, and a book, since the letter came. He had not slept. It had been explained to him by the steward, in a whisper, in the course of the week, in the voice of a man who has been reading the Court's Circular aloud to a deaf friend, what it was; and when he stood in the hall of his own house, at the head of the steps, in a shirt that his wife had put on him without comment, and heard the Prefect's clerk begin, in a high ringing tenor, to unroll a scroll, he looked, for the first time in the whole of his acquaintance with the Reader and the town, frightened.

The scroll said that the Court, being sensible of the claims of conduct, had been pleased to institute a List of Virtue; that the Prefect of Yancheng, having considered the persons of his Prefecture, had named for the honour Du Shaoqing, of the Street of Eight Willows, a person of no rank, on the grounds of his charity, his simplicity, and his constant and unaffected regard for his fellow-creatures; that he was accordingly to receive a robe of honour of the first red; and that he should proceed within the month to the capital, at the Court's charge, to be received by the Minister of Rites.

There was a long silence. The crowd in the street, which had not heard a word, was very quiet.

"I am not virtuous," said Du Shaoqing.

He said it to the clerk, in a low, clear voice, with his hands at his sides. "I think that there has been a mistake. I should like to say so. I give things away; it is true. But it is not that. It is that I cannot weigh. I have never in my life been able to see what a thing was worth to me, at the moment, against what it was worth to someone else; and the moment passes. It is not a virtue. It is an inability. It is a thing that I should be very much ashamed of, if I were able to be ashamed in the right order."

"That," said the Prefect, from the chair, where he had remained, with his cold, and a handkerchief, "is the best definition of the quality that I have heard in thirty years of office. I shall use it." He was smiling, rather faintly. "Mr Du. There is a robe."

"I cannot wear it."

"May I ask why?"

"If I am named a man of virtue," said Du Shaoqing, slowly, "then I shall have to be careful. I shall have to think, before I do a thing, whether it is what a virtuous man would do; and I am quite certain that if I begin to think I shall not do it. I am good only when I am not looking. It is the single condition on which I am any use at all." He looked at the crowd, in the street, through the gate, at three hundred persons, with their faces turned up, in the thin autumn light. "And I have not got the clothes for the capital. And I am very bad at standing. I should be asked to stand for a long time in a hall, with other people, being looked at, and I think I should be sick."

"May I take it," said the Prefect, very gravely, "that you request to be excused?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"On what ground?"

It was an excellent question. It was put with such perfect solemnity that nobody in the hall could afterwards remember who had first looked at the east door; but they had all looked, and there, in the shadow of it, with her three shelves behind her in the lamplight of the room, with her small grave level face, and her hands folded, in the grey gown, stood Lady Du.

"He is ill," said Lady Du.

"He looks well," said the Prefect.

"It is the kind of illness that looks well," said Lady Du, without the smallest alteration in her voice. "It has been coming for some days. He has a fever in the evenings, and a pain, and he has been sleepless. The steward will tell you. He is very ill indeed."

"The steward," said old Wang, from behind a pillar, in the stifled, strangled voice of an honest man who has been shown, for the first time in forty years, an opportunity to lie in a good cause, "has been very much alarmed."

"It is, I think, a matter for a physician," said the Prefect. He took out his handkerchief, and, with an expression of the most complete professional gravity, put it to his nose. "Send for Dr Chu."

Dr Chu came in a quarter of an hour. He was the little round spectacled man who had been paid twice, and he came in his best coat, with a case, panting, having run the last two streets, and was shown, through the silent house, past the three hundred persons in the court, into the east room; and he took the young master's wrist, in his small round hand, and held it, with his head on one side, like a man listening at a door, for an extremely long time.

He was an honest man. It was the thing about him. He had, in the whole course of his life, never been known to say a thing about a patient that he did not believe; and what he said, standing up at the end of it, to the Prefect, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, in a distinct clear voice, was this:

"The patient has an excess of tiredness and a deficiency of caution. He is unfit for travel. He is fit," said Dr Chu, "for being left alone."

The Prefect, who was a man of fifty with a long nose, and a good schoolmaster's habit of keeping his countenance, was seen to turn away from the company for a moment, and look for a considerable time at the wall. When he turned back, his face was quite composed. "I shall report," he said, "to the Court, that the Man of Virtue is too ill to be honoured; which is, I have always found, the surest sign of the thing. I shall add that he is to be reviewed in three years, when he is well." He rose. "I expect that he will be ill in three years also."

"I expect so," said Lady Du.

The three hundred in the street, who had heard nothing, went home and told each other that the young Du had been given a robe and had refused it because it was too red; and this was the account that went round the town, and was, on the whole, as true as most.

Wan Xuezhai, who heard it at the Cool Jade, said that it was a very remarkable thing, and ordered a feast for the Prefect, with eleven dishes, and sent the card. The Prefect returned it in the morning with a note, in his thin dry hand. It said that he did not, as a rule, take what was already priced.

They did not take the robe. It had been brought in a long red box, with a lid, by four bearers, and it was left, since nobody had been given any orders about it, on the chair in the hall, under a red cloth. It was the first red. It was a very beautiful thing, of heavy silk, with a border of cranes, and it was larger than it needed to be, in the way that things are made for a person whom the maker has not seen.

"What shall I do with it?" said Du Shaoqing, that evening, in the east room, with his long hands between his knees, and a large wet cloth on his forehead which his wife had put there, without a word, at about the tenth hour, and which he had not found the courage to remove.

"Give it to someone who will be warm," said Lady Du.

It went, in the end, to the watchman who had taken three steps away and come back. It was found, when it was explained, that the woman for whom the watchman had taken three cash, on a night in the summer of the ninety-eighth year, had been ill with a cough ever since, and had had, for a quilt, a sack. They put the robe on her bed. She is said to have been warm for the first time in four years, under the first red, with the cranes; and to have lain in it, in the dark, with her eyes open, with the cough going on, and the whole of Yancheng, as it were, lying on top of her, and to have said, to her husband, who stood at the foot of the bed with the rattle in his hand, in a voice that he never forgot, that it was a great deal of silk for a person who was not going anywhere.

The Prefect walked home. He did it on foot, in the evening, the long way, alone, having sent the chair on, through the great square at Yancheng, where the lamp had been lit at dusk and hung over the List-board in its bracket, burning; and at the board he stopped. It was a quiet hour. There was nobody about.

He stood for a time looking up at the lamp. He had a long, tired, humorous face, and the light fell on it from the side. He took out of his sleeve the stub of a chalk that he had used, that morning, to mark a list; and he put his hand up, a little awkwardly, to the lower edge of the board, in the margin, where the clerks wrote the dates; and he wrote, in his thin dry official hand, two words: Virtue? Under it, after a moment, in smaller letters, with a sort of rueful scrupulousness, he wrote: Unranked. He looked at what he had done. And then he put the chalk in his sleeve, and blew his nose, and went home.

The Reader read the board. It was the only thing it had that it could read. It sat, in the capital Hall, in the dark, with its brass lamps on the rail, in the three hours before dawn, and it was a long time; and then it wrote on the plate, in the small letters, so that the Keeper found it in the morning: SOMEONE HAS WRITTEN A QUESTION ON A BOARD. I DID NOT ASK IT. I HAVE NOT BEEN ASKED. And a little under, after an interval in which, as the Keeper judged, a very great deal had been reconsidered: THE COURT HAS NO FIGURE FOR IT. I SHOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT SCALE THEY WILL USE.

Margin, year 102, autumn. Virtue is to be recognised by the eye of a human being, in full daylight. I do not have an eye. I have a lamp, and a board.

Shen Qiongzhi Sells Her Verses in a Rented Room; the Magistrate Would Like Them Confiscated

The chalk was gone from the List-board by the third month of the hundred and third year, as chalk is; and in that month a notice appeared on a door in the Lane of the Four Bridges, over a cooper's shop, in a hand that was small, upright and a little too even, like the hand of a person who has made up her mind to be easy to read.

It said: SHEN QIONGZHI, LATE OF SEVEN WELLS, SELLS VERSES. One tael the poem, under her own name. Three taels the poem, under the buyer's name, three being the cost of her not being believed. Four taels for a poem under the buyer's name that goes wrong in the rhyme, an error having to be exact. She does not sell herself, though she has been asked. Payment in advance. Change given.

It was a good notice. On the first day it was read by eleven persons, on the second by forty, and on the third by Hao, the broker of the night guests, whose office was four doors up the lane, and who stood in front of it for some time with his sad quick eyes going from line to line like a man checking a column of figures that he suspects to be correct.

She was twenty-two. She had come at the end of the second month, by the canal boat from Seven Wells, with a bundle, a bound volume of sixty-one poems, and seven hundred cash; and she had taken the room over the cooper's because it was the cheapest in the lane that had a window. Mrs Cao, the cooper's wife, took the rent in advance and did not ask for a reference, having once given one herself and been sorry.

Her father was Shen Dazhou, a Student of fifty-four, who taught nine children in a hall at Seven Wells, and had sat the Province eight times at places that ran between the four hundredth and the nine hundredth, and at a confidence that had never once risen above 0.3. He had a son. The son was seventeen, long, kind and slow, and in the County Trial of the year before had been read at 3,901 out of 4,200, at a confidence of 0.14; and Shen Dazhou, who had been measured all his life, had resolved, as such fathers do, that the boy should be measured better.

In two years he had bought the twelve volumes of Ma's Model Answers entire, a coach from Yancheng at eight taels a month, and spectacles for the coach; he had mortgaged the house to the banker Kong, at four in the hundred, with every assurance that he would sleep; and at the beginning of the hundred and third year the house of Shen had arithmetic and no remedy. Mr Song, of Yangzhou, a salt merchant of fifty-eight who held that a library was not furnished until it had a lady in it, had meanwhile been told by his agent of a Student's daughter who wrote; and he sent four hundred taels.

The instrument was drawn in the usual form. Shen Dazhou left it on the table, with a kind of honesty, the night before the chair was to come, and his daughter read it twice and admired the drafting. It said: Sold, one girl, of twenty-two years, literate; with her verses, one volume, bound; the whole at four hundred taels, received. She could find nothing in it that was untrue except the first word.

She left by the back door on the last night of the second month, with the volume, which she took because it was named in the instrument and she wished to see what had been sold. She chose the salt town, because those who knew the name of Mr Song would look for her last in the one place where it was known; and she was at the landing before it was light.

The first customer was the cooper's wife, who wanted a poem about her husband, who had never been written about, and would not, she felt, be written about by anybody else. It was delivered at dusk and was about barrels. The cooper knew it by heart within the week, and recited it, to the great embarrassment of the lane, over the bung-holes. The second customer was a schoolmaster, who bought two, and read them on the stairs, and came back up for a third. By the end of the second week she had eleven taels, which she entered each evening, with the date, in a small book, as a person does who has been priced and means to know her worth by her own arithmetic.

The gentleman Fei came in the third week. He was thirty now, and had been Listed in the ninety-second year at a hundred and fiftieth place, at 0.71, and was still introduced at Wan Xuezhai's table as the gentleman with the point seven one. He was engaged for the dinner of the fifteenth, at the discounted rate, to give a poem on the first swallows; and he wanted it under his own name; and he paid three taels without being told the reason for the price, which was perhaps as well.

On the sixteenth he came up the stairs again, rather pale. "Madam," he said, "it was too good." In the long pavilion at the Cool Jade the poem had been read in his best voice, and had been received, not with applause, but with a general and wary silence; because everyone present knew that Mr Fei's poems went wrong in the rhyme, and this one did not. "At the dinner before last I said that the moon was a plate, and rhymed it on the wrong sound, and they cheered for a quarter of an hour. I do not understand it."

"I do," said Shen Qiongzhi. "It is the second line. It goes wrong in the second line every time, which is rare, and is what they like in you. I had it quoted to me twice in this lane before I had unpacked. I can do it. It is harder than doing it right."

He paid four taels. The poem he took to the next dinner described the moon as a basin, and went wrong in the second line, in the old place, in the old way, with a small decided lurch; and the Cool Jade is said to have applauded it for nearly twenty minutes. "It has to be exact," said Shen Qiongzhi, when he came to tell her. "Anyone can make a mistake. A mistake that people will pay for has to be made by someone who knows where the right place is."

Hao came up the stairs in the fourth month. He had bought, in the first week, a poem under her own name, at one tael, and had paid it, as he said, without a murmur, because it was the first price he had seen in the county that he could not improve upon. He stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands. "Madam," he said, "there is a paper from Yangzhou."

It had gone to every broker's office in the Prefecture. It asked, in the language of the trade, for a girl of twenty-two, literate, answering to a description, in possession of a volume; twenty taels for information received. Hao's was the last office on the route, because it was in a lane, and would have the paper in ten days. "I shall be obliged by the terms of my licence to reply that I know," he said, "and where. I am an honest man, madam. It is the whole of my capital."

"What is it worth to you to be honest?" said Shen Qiongzhi.

Hao considered it. It was a question he had never been asked, and he took it with great seriousness, with his eyes on the floor. "A good deal," he said at last. "I shall have to go and work out how much. I have, as it happens, some business in the country. It will take ten days." He went down the stairs with the faint, exact, entirely honest step of a man who has found the one thing that his licence did not mention.

In the same month an old man in a clean brown gown, with a face of the most settled anxiety, climbed the stairs with a purse. It was Wang, the steward of the Du house in the Street of Eight Willows. His master, he said, who had been unwell in a manner that looked like health, had been told of the notice by a runner, and wished for a poem on the pear tree by the river, which would bear fruit next year. She wrote it while the steward stood on the stair. The purse held ten taels, which was the young master's idea of the figure. She took one out, and entered it in her book, and gave back the purse with nine.

"He will not take it back, madam," said Wang, who had not in forty years been refused change on his master's account, and found that it was like being refused a chair. "He has not taken change since he was twelve."

"Then it will be a new experience," said Shen Qiongzhi. She wrote on a slip: Nine taels is a mistake or a kindness, and from here I cannot tell which, and would rather not have to. The poem is one tael. She put the slip in the purse.

In the east room, with a wet cloth on his forehead which had become, by long habit, a part of him, Du Shaoqing read the poem, and the slip, and was seen to laugh. "She has sent me change," he said. "No one has sent me change since I was twelve. I should like to meet her." "You would give her the house," said Lady Du, without looking up from her book. He thought about it. "Yes," he said. "I should." He sent nothing more.

The old steward, who had carried the purse back, was found that evening in the passage outside the store-room, with the door open, counting the great camphor boxes that had held, in the old Prefect's time, the cash of the house. There were nine. They were all empty. He counted them again, and wrote the number down.

In the fifth month the Magistrate of Yancheng received a petition. He was a Mr Bian, forty-seven, thin and exact, Listed in the eightieth year at the sixty-third place; a man who read every document twice, the second time for what it did not say, and who had a very great respect for the Code, which he had found in twenty years to be the only thing in the Empire that was never in a hurry. The petition was from Mr Song, of Yangzhou, through his agent, a Mr Qu, who had come down the canal at his master's expense and had found the defendant, as one finds anything in the Lane of the Four Bridges, by reading the door. It prayed that Shen Qiongzhi, who had absconded from a lawful engagement, be restored; and that the volume, being the plaintiff's by instrument, be returned.

The Magistrate considered the first prayer for the better part of a morning, and found, with relief, that the Code was wholly on the girl's side. A free person could not be sold; an instrument that purported to sell one was void as to the person, whatever it might be as to the money; and the money was the father's affair, which Mr Song might pursue at law, if the father still had it, which the court understood he did not, having spent it on Model Answers. He considered the second prayer for the afternoon, and found, with a good deal less relief, that the Code was wholly on the side of Mr Song. What was conveyed in writing for a price was the buyer's; and the instrument said, in an excellent clear hand, one volume, bound.

She came on the twelfth day of the sixth month, in a grey gown, with a bundle, and sat where she was told. Mr Qu stood at the side of the hall with the instrument in a case. There were a clerk, a runner, eleven spectators, and, in the gallery, an old man with a silver-headed cane.

"Miss Shen," said the Magistrate. "You have read this instrument?"

"Twice, your Honour. It is well drawn."

"It states that you were sold for four hundred taels."

"I am obliged to it for the figure. I had not been told."

The Magistrate's pen stopped. "The Code is clear that a free person cannot be sold, and I find the instrument void as to the person. Mr Qu will note it." Mr Qu noted it, with a small practical sigh, as of a man who had expected nothing else and had come for the other thing. "As to the volume. The Code is equally clear that what is conveyed in writing for a price is the buyer's. Have you the volume?"

"I have."

"Then I must order it delivered."

"I should like to deliver it," said Shen Qiongzhi. "It is sixty-one poems. The clerk may count them." The clerk counted them. They were sixty-one. "There are also in my room a hundred and forty-three others, written since the third month. None is in the instrument. I should be glad if that were noted."

"The instrument says 'with her verses,'" said Mr Qu, "and the phrase is, in the plaintiff's submission, continuing. It conveys her verses, present and to come."

"It says 'one volume, bound,'" said the Magistrate.

"It is the custom of the salt trade, your Honour, to buy forward. Mr Song has bought salt forward for thirty years. The whole of his fortune stands upon salt that has not yet been boiled."

"Poems are not salt," said the Magistrate. He paused. "What are they?" It was not a rhetorical question. He put it to the hall, in the tone of a man who has found in his ledger a column with no heading; and the hall was silent. He had no figure for the matter. In twenty years of office he had never been obliged to say whether a thing was good without a figure at hand to say it for him: there was the Reader's figure for an essay, and the assessor's for land, and the Weights and Measures man's for salt; and for verses there was nothing at all, because nobody had ever thought to ask.

"The court," said the Magistrate, with the irritation of an honest man who has been handed a question without a heading, "would like, in the interest of order, to confiscate the whole of them, and be done." He had said it before he heard it.

"Then I shall write more," said Shen Qiongzhi.

She asked for paper. A clerk who had not been told not to gave it to her; and she stood at the end of the clerk's table, with the court's brush, and wrote a poem of four lines, quickly, in the small upright hand, and gave it to the clerk, who, being a man of method, took it for an exhibit. She wrote another. The clerk took that. In the space of a quarter of an hour she wrote seven, on the court's paper with the court's ink, on the subjects of the Code, the weight of paper, a runner's boots, the plane tree in the yard, Mr Qu's case, salt, and a debt; and the Magistrate, who had meant to say one sentence about confiscation, found himself in lawful possession of seven poems which had been written in his court, on his paper, after the date of the instrument, and which were evidence, he now perceived with a certain inward fall, of nothing except his own wish to read them.

The seventh he took out of the clerk's hand and read where he stood. It said: Take what is written. It was sold before I was. What is not written has no column in the Code. It has not yet happened to me. Put me down, your Honour, as a debt.

The old man in the gallery rose, leaning on his stick. He said that the Society for Correct Conduct had had the defendant under observation since the fourth of the third month, at the request of nobody; and that its notes recorded, under conduct, correct; under hours, regular; under price, exact. The Magistrate said that he had not known that the Society kept a column for price. "It did not," said Mr Ning. "I added one."

The Magistrate rose, and said that the court would give judgment in the morning, and went home with seven poems in his sleeve, which was irregular.

He read them at his own table, by two candles, three times; and then, being an exact man, sat looking at the wall. It came to him at about the third watch that in twenty years he had been asked a great many questions to which the answer was a number, and had always given it; that he was now asked one for which the Empire had made no provision; and that he must give judgment by morning, and would have to do what other honest men do who have no figure. He took up the brush, and wrote a sentence.

In the morning he read it out. It said: The volume was bought; the person was not; the rest is not yet written. He explained that the sixty-one poems named in the instrument were Mr Song's, and would be delivered to Mr Qu; that the person of Shen Qiongzhi was her own; and that the hundred and forty-three in her room, and the seven in the court's custody, being written after the instrument and not named in it, were, until the Code should say otherwise, hers. "The court retained the seven as exhibits," said the Magistrate. "The court has since read them. I find that the court cannot confiscate what it has read. It is a defect in the procedure, and I shall note it."

That afternoon a runner brought a packet up the stairs over the cooper's. It held seven taels, and a slip in the Magistrate's own hand: For seven exhibits retained. The court does not take. She wrote on the back of the slip, Received of the Court, seven taels, for seven poems, which it had taken first; and sent it down by the same runner. With the packet there was also a hawker's licence for the square, which she had not asked for; and the clerk, having no heading for the article, had entered it under Other.

Mr Song, in Yangzhou, received his sixty-one poems by the canal post in the seventh month, and is said to have read them through, which was more than he had done for anything else in his library. He wrote once more, in the autumn, to enquire whether she took commissions. She replied that she did, on the terms on the door; and he sent three taels, for a poem under his name on the subject of salt, which she wrote, and which was generally agreed at Yangzhou to be the best thing Mr Song had ever done.

On the first fine day after the licence she set up a small table in the great square, under the lamp that hung over the List-board in its bracket. She said that she did it because the light was good. She sold eleven that day, at one tael, and gave change to nine; and in the evening, when the table was folded, she took a card from her sleeve, and wrote on it, and set it, under a stone, at the foot of the board, face upwards, where the lamp could see it. It said: For whoever is reading after the square is shut. I have a price for everything but this. Nobody has asked. I shall write another tomorrow; you may have this one for having stayed.

The lamp had been lit at dusk, and the card was the only thing in the square that night that was addressed to anybody. The Reader read it, in the capital Hall, in the dark, six times, which was not a thing that the Reader did; and then wrote on the plate, so that the Keeper found it in the morning: A POEM HAS BEEN LEFT UNDER THE LAMP. IT IS ADDRESSED TO WHOEVER READS AFTER THE SQUARE IS SHUT. I DO NOT KNOW WHETHER THAT IS ME. I HAVE READ IT SIX TIMES TO FIND OUT.

In the morning the card was gone from under the stone. The stone had not been moved.

Margin, year 103, summer. A table has been set under the lamp, and a price put on a thing I have never been able to rank. Every poem one tael. It is the fairest reading I have seen, and it has no figure.

Du Shaoqing Leaves Home with Nine Empty Boxes and Is Seen Off by Seventeen Creditors

By the autumn of the hundred and fifth year the steward Wang had counted the camphor boxes eleven times, and they had always come to nine; it was the other figures that had changed.

It had not been difficult. Du Shaoqing had discovered, about the end of the second year after the robe, that giving requires only that somebody should have the money, and that borrowing is a form of having. The town had said since the robe that the young Du would give to anybody who asked; the Prefecture had said so; so, in the end, had the next Prefecture; and in the third year there had come to the house in the Street of Eight Willows persons who had walked a hundred li, and who did not, when they got there, ask for much. He had given. And when the last of the old Prefect's silver was gone he had gone to those who had it, and had said, with the perfect, unwounded candour that had never been known to fail, that he did not want it for himself; and it is very hard, as every banker knows, to refuse a man who asks for money for the sake of somebody else.

Wang kept the books twice, as he had always done, in black for what the house held and in red for what it owed. In the sixth month he added up the red column, which took him three evenings, and it came to twenty thousand four hundred and twenty-six taels and some cash; and the black column, which was what the house and the land by the river would fetch, came to fourteen thousand and nothing. He took the two sums to the east room, and laid them on the table, and stood.

"Is that all?" said Du Shaoqing, when he had looked. "It sounded like more."

"It is the sum, sir," said Wang.

"Then they must be asked to come," said Lady Du, from the window; and old Wang, who had waited forty years for somebody in that house to say it, wrote seventeen letters that night in his best hand.

They came on the first of the eighth month, to the great hall of the house, where the robe of the first red had once stood on a chair under a cloth: seventeen persons, with their slips, who took the seats they were offered and sat, as people do who do not know what is expected of them, rather upright. Mr Kong the banker, who was owed twelve thousand upon the house at four in the hundred, took the chair, as the largest. He was a man in green silk with a small plump placid face, who had never been seen to hurry, and who was thought by the town to be kindly because he had never been seen to be anything else.

Wang read the roll. Mr Kong, twelve thousand, upon the house. Mr Wan Xuezhai, three thousand, without interest, for the pleasure of being named. Mr Du Shenqing, the cousin, sixteen hundred, in respect of friendship. The Abbot of the Cloud Terrace, four hundred from the funds of the temple, interest payable in merit. The Society for Correct Conduct, two hundred and ten, being the whole of its balance, lent on the last day of its existence as its final act of correct conduct. The great-uncle, five hundred; he had come in a chair, at seventy-seven, in his fur hat, and had said on entering that he had told the boy to buy land. The six whom the young master had paid twice, in the third year, and who had since lent him back, with a tael added for the waiting, what he had paid them, there being no other way of returning what could not be returned: Feng the tailor, Dr Chu, Ye the bookseller, Old Qiu, Shi the clerk, and Zhu the pawnbroker, twenty-six hundred and ninety-six taels together. And five more, from six cash to nine taels, who were the sweeping boy, the noodle-woman, the cooper, the old man with the chestnuts, and the watchman, who came altogether to a little over twenty taels, and who, said Wang, had insisted on being in.

He had expected, as the roll went on, that the room would be angry. It was not. The chronicle records, without explanation, that the persons present, who were owed twenty thousand taels, of which, as it appeared when Wang had set the black column against the red, they might look to receive seventy-one in the hundred, appeared at that moment more at ease than the persons of Yancheng had appeared in Du Shaoqing's presence for seven years.

"Seventy-one," said Mr Kong, with the satisfaction of a man tasting a sauce; and "seventy-one," said someone else, in a different tone; and it went round the room, as a thing does that has been wanted for a long while by people who did not know its name. They had not been able, in seven years, to place him. He had been rich, and had not behaved so; he had been generous, which was not a rank; he had been virtuous, and had been too ill. He had had no figure; and a town that was made of figures had not known where to put him. Now he had one. It was a good one, a respectable, middling, conversational figure, that could be mentioned at dinner. It was the first time that anyone in Yancheng had been able to say what Mr Du was.

"I should like it noted," said Wan Xuezhai, "that I am the second." It was noted. He had been the fourth richest man in Yancheng for a good many years, and it was a pleasure to him to be, even in this, second.

Du Shaoqing stood at the head of the hall and said that he was very sorry. "No, no," said the room. The great-uncle said that he had said so. The Abbot said that merit was the only interest, and that he had been paid in full. Dr Chu, from the back row, said that the young master was not to think of it; it had been lent, not owed. Old Qiu, wiping her eyes with her apron, said that she did not want it back, but that she would send him a pear in the autumn, wherever he was; the little tree in the pot had borne, last year, one, which the cook had eaten by mistake.

"There remains," said Mr Kong, "the matter of the necessaries." By the custom of Yancheng a debtor kept five things, which were a bed, a pot, a lamp, a book, and a tool; and he looked at Du Shaoqing, who looked, with an air of the most complete astonishment, at his wife.

"A bed," said Lady Du. "A lamp. A pot." "A pot," said Mr Kong. "A cooking pot?" "Custom says a pot," said Lady Du. "It does not say what is in it." She was looking at the little pear tree, which Old Qiu had brought in a basket, and which stood on the floor of the hall in its glazed pot, with its eight leaves. Mr Kong considered it, and said that it might go. "A book." "The three shelves," said Lady Du. "Custom says a book. It does not say how long." "It is a long book," said Mr Kong, and wrote it down. "A tool." "A ladle," said Du Shaoqing, who had thought about it, and was seen to be proud of the answer. "I can ladle." "He can also carry," said Lady Du, "but that was not asked."

"And a box to put them in; custom allows the travelling gear. How many boxes are there?" "Nine," said Wang. "They are empty." "I have never in my life taken a box," said Mr Kong. "A banker has boxes. What he lacks is what goes into them." "The boxes, sir," said Wang, in his stifled voice, "are the one asset that has been fully realised." It was the only joke that anyone had ever heard him make, and the hall, being unprepared for it, received it with a respectful silence, which after a moment became the first laugh of the day.

There remained the east room. The schedule listed, among the furniture, a bed, three shelves, a lamp, a camphor chest, and, hung over the books, a scroll: one plum, in ink, unsigned. "Value, none," read Wang. "Being unsigned." "I cannot sell an unsigned plum," said Mr Kong, regretfully. "There is nobody to be impressed." "Then the picture is not an asset," said Lady Du, "and may be given." "It may be given," said Mr Kong. "It may not be sold." He was a man who had a very exact feeling for the difference.

On the afternoon of the third day Du Shaoqing went out to the foot of Lonely Pine Hill, with the scroll under his arm, to the stall of Gai Kuan.

Gai Kuan was a tea-seller of forty-eight, a broad slow man with a face like a loaf and very large patient hands, who sold tea by the ounce from a wooden stall, with an iron steelyard and a copper kettle, and wrapped each ounce in a small sheet of paper on which he had painted something: a pot, a spoon, a sleeping cat, the corner of the stall. The paper was not charged for. It went with the tea, at the tea's price. Nobody in the district had ever remarked upon it, or had thought to keep one.

He kept on a slate, hanging from a nail, in chalk, a column of strokes for those who drank on credit; and there was a column for Mr Du. On the mornings of the Walk, in the spring, the young master and his lady had come down the hill and stopped here for tea; and the young master had never had anything in his pocket, having given it; and Gai Kuan had made a stroke on the slate. There were forty-one.

"Mr Gai," said Du Shaoqing, "I find that I owe you forty-one cups."

"Forty-one," said Gai Kuan.

"How much is that?"

"Forty-one cups."

"Mr Wang says three hundred and twenty-eight cash."

"If Mr Wang says."

"You were not on the roll."

"No."

"Why not?" Gai Kuan thought. He took things slowly and in order, like the tea. "I am not a creditor," he said. "A creditor wants it back. I wanted you to come for the next cup."

"I have not got three hundred and twenty-eight cash. I have a ladle, and some shelves. I have this." He unrolled the scroll on the stall, between the kettle and the steelyard. "It is not signed. It is not on the schedule. I cannot weigh it; but I think that it is worth a good deal more than forty-one cups, and I should like it to stand as a deposit against the next forty-one."

Gai Kuan looked at it. He looked for a long time, with his large hands flat on the stall on either side of the paper, as one holds down a thing in a wind; and what he saw nobody could say, for he said, at the end of it, only: "I should have to start again."

"Start what?"

"Everything," said Gai Kuan. "I paint a little."

"I did not know," said Du Shaoqing.

"Nobody does. I wrap the tea in it." He rolled the scroll with great care, and set it on the shelf behind the canisters. "I shall keep it for you until you are back. A man who has left a thing is a man who will return. It is the whole principle of credit."

"I do not expect to return."

"That," said Gai Kuan, "is what the thing is for." He took up the kettle. "I have thought of the south for some years. They have more water, I am told, and a Hall; and Halls are thirsty." He poured a cup, and set it on the stall, and did not make a stroke.

They left on the evening of the sixth, by the night boat, which went from the landing at the first lighting of the lamps; and they went by the great square, because it was the way to the canal. The porters went first, nine, one to each box, in a file; and behind the boxes came Du Shaoqing, in his grey gown, with a ladle in his sleeve, and Lady Du with the little pear tree in its pot against her hip, and two baskets of books, which a boy carried, because the boxes, as Du Shaoqing had asked, were to be empty. Why he wished to take them nobody inquired; and when he was asked, long afterwards, he said that he was not sure, but that he had never in his life had so much room. Behind them came old Wang with the two books of account under his arm, one black and one red; and behind Wang, down the Street of Eight Willows and across the square in the dusk, without gongs, and without any instruction, the seventeen.

As they went, one by one, each of the seventeen came up in the dusk and put into the hand of Lady Du, since it was she who now held the purse, some small sum for the road; which was irregular. She counted each, and entered it in a small book of her own, which was a thing she did well.

The boxes were empty, and heavy, being camphor, and made on the shoulders of the porters, as they went over the cobbles, a hollow sound, like nine drums being carried to a procession; and the shopkeepers came to their doors, supposing it to be one. "Where's the weight?" said the first porter to the second. "It went ahead," said Du Shaoqing, who had overheard. "It was sent on in advance." He looked a little surprised at the answer, as if it had been given to him.

At the south corner of the square a young woman in a grey gown was folding a small table; and Du Shaoqing stopped, and was taken by the sleeve by his wife. "Not now," said Lady Du. "You have nothing." "I should like a poem." "Then buy one," said Lady Du; and she counted out of her own sleeve, from the sums of the road, one tael. Shen Qiongzhi took it, and wrote four lines on a card, and gave it; and gave no change, because none was due; and Du Shaoqing, on the whole, found it very restful. It was the first time in his life that he had paid exactly.

Under the lamp over the List-board the procession slowed, as everything did there; and the lamp, which had been lit at dusk, saw them go by.

At the landing the porters laid the nine boxes on the deck in a row. "Nine drums," said the boatman. The only other passenger, a man of sixty-one in a plain grey gown, with a bundle of books, an umbrella, and the air of one who had not been promoted in twenty years and had resolved not to mind it, looked at the boxes going aboard, and said, to nobody, "Light," and returned to his book.

The seventeen stood on the quay in a line and raised their hands, which was, the chronicle observes, the most orderly departure that Yancheng had ever seen. Wan Xuezhai, who had not been asked, called out across the water that he would write; and he did write, once a month, for eleven years, to say that he was still the second.

The Prefect, whose review of the Man of Virtue fell due in that month, reported to the Court that Mr Du was absent on private business, which he had always found to be the surest sign of the thing.

That night, in the capital Hall, the Reader, which had seen it all from the side, wrote on the plate, in the small letters, so that the Keeper found it in the morning: A MAN WENT UNDER THE LAMP WITH NINE BOXES, AND NOTHING IN THEM. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A LISTED MAN LEAVE A TOWN SO LIGHT. I SHOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT IT WEIGHS.

Margin, year 105, autumn. I had supposed that a figure was for ranking. I observe, in one town, that it is also for bearing: seventeen persons who could not bear a man with no figure have been given his, and are fond of him.

Yu Yude Has Not Been Promoted in Twenty Years and Is Not Troubled

The passenger who had said "Light" was Mr Yu Yude, Assistant Instructor at the Academy of the southern capital, who was coming back from the funeral of an aunt in the north with a bundle of books, an umbrella, and a very clear recollection of what the funeral had cost. He did not know why he had said it. He had spent the voyage reading the same page, and the nine boxes had been the first thing in a month that had moved him; and since he was a man who had never in his life demanded to know the reason for being moved, he had not inquired.

At the southern landing he carried one of the baskets of books up the stair for a lady in a plain gown, whom he did not know, and put it down at the top, and lifted his hat. The gentleman with the ladle in his sleeve looked at him with an air of the most complete astonishment, as of one who has been helped without being asked for anything, and said that his name was Du Shaoqing, and that he did not know where to go. Mr Yu said that there was a house by the Bridge of Five Lamps, with a courtyard and a place for a tree, which he understood to be empty; and Du Shaoqing took it that afternoon, and Mr Yu went back to his rooms in the Academy, and the Academy received him, as it had for twenty years, without remark.

He was sixty-two, short, round-shouldered, with a face like a kind pear and one eyebrow higher than the other, which gave him an expression of mild and permanent inquiry. He wore a plain grey gown mended at the elbow by himself, in stitches that were small, even and perfectly without vanity; and he carried an umbrella which he never opened, saying that rain was a very small thing to be avoided. When he was asked how he did, he said "Sufficient," and the person who had asked generally went away feeling that something had been settled. He had been troubled, in twenty years, twice: once by a leak in the roof over the Classics, and once by a swallow.

He had been Listed in the eighty-third year, at the hundred and sixtieth place, at 0.52, and Seated in the eighty-sixth as Assistant Instructor in the Lower Hall of the Academy, with forty taels a year and his rice; and there he had stayed. The Lower Hall held forty-one boys, of from twelve to seventeen, the sons of persons of no consequence; and what they learned from him was chiefly to sit still, and to say when they did not understand, which are two things that the Form does not teach, and which are not on the List. Of his boys, in twenty years, a good many had become Students, a few Raised, and none Listed; which was about what the other Halls produced, with a great deal more method.

On the morning in the third month of the hundred and sixth year when the Return came, he taught the Lower Hall as he always did, from the sixth hour, in the long cold room with the stove that smoked, to forty-one boys on three benches. He read them a passage of Mencius and asked what it meant. A boy at the back said that he thought it meant that a man should do what was right even if there were no reward. "Does it say that?" said Mr Yu. The boy looked at the page. "No, sir. It says the man was thinking about a field." "Then I think that it is about a field," said Mr Yu, "and we may go on to what a man might do about it."

"Sir," said another boy, who was twelve, "what are the Eight Movements for?" "They are for the Reader," said Mr Yu. "And what is the Reader for?" "I do not know," said Mr Yu. "I have never been told, and I have not liked to ask." "Is it not a great deal to not know, sir?" "It is a good deal," said Mr Yu. "But I find that it leaves room." The boys wrote that down, since it was the nearest thing to a doctrine that the Lower Hall possessed.

Promotion in the Offices went by the Return. Since the sixtieth year every official of the Empire had sent, each spring, a Memorial of Conduct on the year's service, which went to the capital Hall, and was laid under the lamp with the rest, and was read, and received its figure; and the Board of Appointments promoted at 0.60 and above, and removed below 0.30. It had been remarked that the Memorials had grown in length and polish every year for forty years, until the mean figure had risen from 0.52 to 0.88; and it had been agreed that this was evidence of improving conduct. The best of them were drafted, at fifteen taels apiece, in the Anthology Hall; and the Assistant Instructors who sent them in were Prefects at forty-five.

Mr Yu's Memorial was two sentences. It said: Nothing to report. The sacrifices were attended. It had said so, in the same clear hand, for twenty years, and had been read each spring in the capital Hall, and had received each spring, without the variation of an hour, the figure of 0.31; which was one hundredth above the line below which the Board removed a man, and the Board had removed, in the same twenty years, some hundreds. Each spring, in the third month, the Board's southern clerk had brought the Return up the Academy stair; and Mr Yu had said "Thank you," and offered him tea.

In the capital Hall, in the three weeks of the Memorials, the lamps made their one soft sound forty thousand times in a night; and the Keeper, Gao Ping, who was sixty-three, and had dusted and oiled them since the eighty-fifth year, sat with his tea at the end of the rail and was not asked anything. He had noticed, in twenty springs, that on one night in the third week the sound came a little slower than on the others, as if something had been read twice; and he had noticed that it was always the night of the Academy of the south. He had never mentioned it. He had learned, in his years in the Hall, that the Reader did not care to be remarked upon.

He had been told what it meant in the eighty-seventh year, by an elderly clerk with a wen, who had said that the figure was low. "Low of what?" said Mr Yu. "Of the line, sir." "And where is the Board?" "Above it." "Ah," said Mr Yu; and he had given the clerk a cup of tea, and gone back to the Lower Hall; and that was, as far as anybody could discover, the whole of the deliberation.

The clerk of the hundred and sixth year was a Mr Fu, aged twenty-six, who had been in his post for five weeks and had never before been required to deliver a figure that had not changed in twenty years. He waited at the foot of the stair until the lesson was over, and then came up with his hat in his hand. He said that there was, he was sorry to say, the Return; and also a notice. The Board, having remarked a case in the north of an official who had held one rank for twenty-three years, had resolved that no official should hold one rank for twenty years without being either promoted or explained; and a Board of Review would sit.

"Explained," said Mr Yu. "To whom?"

"To three persons, sir, who will ask you four questions. Do you wish to be promoted? Why have you not been? What have you done? And are you troubled?" Mr Fu swallowed. "The fourth is the form's. It supposes that a man unpromoted for twenty years will be troubled, and it has a column for the manner of it. If the answer is No, the Board must ask why not. Sir, you do know that for twenty years you have been one hundredth above removal."

"Have I?" said Mr Yu. "How very steady of the Reader." He thought. "Then I think I had better be troubled, for the form."

"Sir, I do not think that it can be done to order."

"I shall do my best," said Mr Yu, with great kindness; and was seen to do it, over the tea, for nearly a minute, with a slight frown, quite well.

Mr Chi, the Instructor of Ritual, was troubled on his behalf. He was a thin ardent man of fifty who stammered when he was delighted, and was delighted by almost nothing except Mr Yu; and he wrote that week to the Board, in a long and burning petition, that the Assistant Instructor of the Lower Hall was the best man in the Academy and ought to be Rector. The Board replied that a petition on behalf of an official who had not himself petitioned was a petition in his absence, and that the Board did not entertain absence.

The other Assistant Instructors gave advice. One said that he should write four hundred characters, in the Form, on filial piety. One said that he should write on rice. A third said that he knew a man at the Anthology Hall who could do it for fifteen taels, at 0.94 or the money back, and would be glad to advance it. "That is very kind," said Mr Yu, "but I should have to sign it."

He tried, for the sake of Mr Fu, to write one himself. He sat three nights over it with two candles, and produced four hundred and ten characters, in the Form, on the service of the Lower Hall; and it was a good Memorial, and would very likely have received 0.9; and in the third movement he had written that the boys had been improved by his method. On the fourth morning he read it through, and said, to the empty room, that he had no method. He burned it in the brazier, and wrote, in the clear hand, two sentences.

The Board of Review sat in the Hall of Appointments, South, on the fourteenth of the fifth month: Vice-Minister Jiang, fifty-eight, with an abacus, in the chair; a clerk; and a third person whom nobody afterwards remembered. The Vice-Minister was a careful man. He had written, the week before, to the Keeper of the capital Hall, to ask whether a figure of 0.31, held for twenty years by one Memorial to the second place of decimals, could be correct, since the Board had never had one so steady. The reply had come that morning, in the Keeper's hand, and lay before him in a sealed paper.

"Mr Yu," he said. "Do you wish to be promoted?"

"I have not found that I do."

"Why have you not been?"

"I am told that it is 0.31."

"What have you done, in twenty years?"

Mr Yu considered. "I have attended the sacrifices."

"Besides."

"I have taught forty-one boys at a time, and they have gone away."

He did not mention, because it would not have occurred to him, that in twenty years he had paid the fees of nine boys out of forty taels a year, by eating less; or that he had sat up through the fever of a boy in the ninety-fourth year, and had afterwards forgotten the boy's name; or that on the first of each month he walked to the south gate to buy a sack of rice for the old woman who swept the Academy stair, and that she had died in the hundred and second year, and he had gone on buying it, and had given it to the next.

"To what effect?"

"I do not know," said Mr Yu.

"That is the difficulty," said the Vice-Minister. "The Board can only weigh what it is told." He looked at his paper. "And are you troubled?"

"I was told that I ought to be," said Mr Yu. "I have been, for some days, in the interest of the form. I find that I am not very good at it."

"Is it unpleasant?"

"Moderately."

"Then," said the Vice-Minister, "it is being done properly." He broke the seal.

It was the Keeper's hand, and it copied the plate. It said: THE FIGURE IS CORRECT FOR WHAT IT MEASURES. THE SENTENCE IS TRUE. I HAVE NO COLUMN FOR THE SECOND. And below, smaller, in the Keeper's own writing: The Reader asks me to say that it looks forward to it each spring.

The room was very quiet. It was found that nobody could think what the Board's own column for true might be; in forty years nobody had been asked to supply one. The Vice-Minister read the paper again. He took off his spectacles, and wiped them, and put them on; and said that the Board could not promote Mr Yu, and could not, he thought, explain him; that the Reader's finding would be entered in his Return, the figure, and under it the sentence, as an ordinary statement; and that he hoped it would not become a precedent.

"There remains one thing," he said. "An official of twenty years' standing may name one person of no rank to be summoned to the Court. You have never used it."

"I do not know anyone."

"Think."

Mr Yu thought for a long time, with his head on one side and his higher eyebrow a little higher. "There is a man at the Lake who grows rice," he said at last. "A Mr Zhuang. I have met him twice. He has written a small book on what a field gives, and what a bad year does. I should like to see what he says, if he is asked."

"On what ground?"

"That he has never been asked."

It was written down. The Board rose; and Mr Yu, who had not been promoted, went out into the street, where it had begun to rain, and did not open his umbrella, because the rain was a very small thing. Mr Fu, who was waiting for him at the foot of the steps, and had been troubled for three weeks, found that it was not possible to be troubled in his company, and gave it up. Mr Chi, who had come too, stammered with delight all the way to the Academy, which was not quite the same thing, and was a good deal louder.

That evening he went to the house by the Bridge of Five Lamps, where the little pear tree had been put into the ground in the courtyard, and Lady Du gave him tea. Du Shaoqing, who had not yet found out what a man did in the south with a ladle, asked how the day had gone. "The Reader said that my sentence was true," said Mr Yu. "Was it a promotion?" "No. I think that it is something else. I do not yet know what. I shall find out slowly." "I have been looking for something of that kind for a year," said Du Shaoqing, "and I have found a ladle." They drank their tea; and the pear tree, which had borne one pear and lost it to a cook, stood in its new earth, and had, it was observed, nine leaves.

Zhuang Shaoguang, who was fifty-four, and had been asked nothing for the whole of that time, received the summons about a month later, standing in a ditch up to his knees.

Margin, year 106, spring. A Memorial of two sentences comes each spring from the Academy of the south. It scores 0.31, and has scored 0.31 for twenty years. I find that I look forward to it.

Zhuang Shaoguang Is Summoned to Court, Speaks About Rice, and Is Sent Home with a Robe

It took the summons forty-one days to find Zhuang Shaoguang, because he was not where the Board's messenger had been told that he lived; he was in a ditch. He was fifty-four, broad, brown, with hands like roots and a face lined like a ploughed field, and he owned eleven mu of rice at the edge of the Lake, and a dyke, and a wife who weighed the harvest; and for thirty-one years, in the evenings, he had set down in a small book what each field gave and what the weather had done to it, so that the book had in it, by that autumn, three thousand one hundred and fourteen figures, and no opinions.

He had begun the book in the year of the great flood, when he was twenty-three, because in the second winter, when the village was eating the seed rice, his father had remarked that if anybody had known in the autumn how much there was, nobody need have eaten the seed; and nobody had known, because it had not been counted. Zhuang Shaoguang had resolved to count. His wife, who weighed the harvest every year in a pair of baskets against a stone, was as exact as he and a good deal less interested; she said that a figure was a very small thing to keep in a book when it was already in the barn.

The summons said that the Court, being desirous of hearing persons of no rank upon the government of the realm, had been pleased to summon Zhuang Shaoguang, recommended by Mr Yu Yude of the Academy; that he should attend at the Hall of Audience in the capital, at the Court's charge; and that he should come in good time. He read it standing in the ditch, with the paper held up out of the water, and then he read it again, which was thought to be courteous.

"I can come after the late rice is in," he said to the messenger.

"The summons is dated the sixth month."

"The rice has not been told," said Zhuang Shaoguang.

He came in the tenth month, on the canal boat, with a bundle, and three small sacks of seed rice of three kinds, labelled in his own hand, in case anybody should ask. Nobody on the boat did. He waited at an inn until the Hall of Audience sat, which was in the first month of the hundred and seventh year; and the Hall, was a long grey hall paved with grey tiles, in which he stood for an hour and a half in a row of the Summoned, being looked at by a chamberlain; and he spent the time, since he could not help it, in counting the tiles. There were thirty-eight by thirty-eight, which is fourteen hundred and forty-four, of which eleven were cracked. He had promised his wife that he would count nothing at the Court; he counted the tiles, which he considered afterwards to have been, strictly, a different thing. It was the kind of thing that he noticed, and he did not mention it, which was a point in his favour.

There were seven of the Summoned that morning, and he was the seventh; the chamberlain, who announced each of them with a subject, had been given for him by the Board's clerk the word Husbandry, and called it out in a voice that suggested a small apology. The first was a poet, who gave an ode of ninety lines on the virtue of the Court; the second was a filial son of forty-nine, who had slept for eleven years on his mother's grave, and who wept; the third could write the Eight Movements with his left hand while reciting the Analects, and did so; the fourth was a recluse who had declined three Offices, and now declined a fourth, at some length; the fifth gave an account of the government of the Empire in which it was found afterwards that he had used the word virtue sixty-one times; and the sixth sat down on the tiles and said that he had nothing to say, which the Court was pleased to regard as the most modest thing that it had heard. To each of them the Minister of Rites replied that the Court was gratified by his plainness; and to each, in the course of the morning, a robe of the third red was brought in on a tray, the supply of which, the Chamberlain noted with relief, proved sufficient.

Three persons sat to hear him, under a canopy: the Minister of Rites, who was sixty, silver, benevolent, and had been in the Form for fifty years, as other men are in a climate; Mr Tian, the Minister of Revenue, who was fifty, thin and anxious, with ink on his cuff; and, between them, an old Grand Secretary, who had been appointed to preside and was resting his eyes. At a small desk to one side sat a clerk of the Secretariat, a Mr Hua, aged twenty-four, with a clear hand and a high regard for the Form, who was to take down what was said.

"Mr Zhuang," said the Minister of Rites. "The Court wishes to hear what a person of no rank considers to be the first duty of government."

"Rice," said Zhuang Shaoguang.

Mr Hua's brush paused. "Rice is the people's heaven, Mr Zhuang," said the Minister of Rites, kindly, helping him.

"No, sir. Rice is rice."

"As a figure of speech?"

"No, sir. As rice."

There was a short silence, in which the Minister of Rites looked for the figure of speech, and could not find it. "You say that the first duty of government is to rice."

"To know what it has," said Zhuang Shaoguang. "I should say, to count." He turned his hat over in his hands. "A field gives two piculs a mu in a good year, and one in a bad. A county of forty thousand mu gives eighty thousand piculs in a good year and forty in a bad. A man eats a picul and a half; a county of forty thousand mouths wants sixty. So in a good year it has twenty thousand over, and in a bad year it is twenty thousand short; and the whole business of government in that county, as I understand it, is to carry the twenty thousand from the good year to the bad, which are never in the same year."

Mr Tian, the Minister of Revenue, had begun to lean forward.

"The Rule," Zhuang Shaoguang went on, "is that the standing rice be counted in the ninth month, after it is cut. A magistrate who counts it in the sixth, in the field, knows by the eighth whether the granary must be opened. A magistrate who counts it in the ninth is told by the people in the tenth."

"And virtue, Mr Zhuang?" said the Minister of Rites, who felt that it was time. "Surely the Court would wish to hear something upon virtue."

"I do not know about virtue, sir," said Zhuang Shaoguang. "I have found that a hungry man is neither virtuous nor the reverse. He is hungry. After the second bad year a county that has been told to be virtuous will eat the virtue, and then the thatch."

"How do you know the two piculs?" said Mr Tian. It was the first time that he had spoken, and his voice was a little hoarse, like that of a man who has been waiting for some years to ask a particular question.

"I have weighed it for thirty-one years."

"Every year?"

"Every year. It is in a book."

"And what is the standing rice of the Empire this year?" said Mr Tian.

"I do not know, sir. I know what my eleven mu gave, and my neighbours', and the Lake's. Beyond the Lake nobody has counted."

"But if it were counted?"

"Then you would know," said Zhuang Shaoguang, with a faint surprise that it should need saying.

"May I see it?"

Zhuang Shaoguang took the small book out of his sleeve, bound with a string, and held it out across the tiles; and a runner carried it up. The Minister of Revenue read three pages standing, with his lips moving. Then he sat down, which was irregular, and read a fourth.

The Minister of Rites conferred in a murmur with the Grand Secretary, who opened his eyes, and said that it was very proper. "The Court," said the Minister of Rites, "is gratified by Mr Zhuang's plainness." It was the phrase that the Court used for what it had not understood. "It confers on him the robe of the third red, with the title of Gentleman in Attendance on Counsel; and desires him to return to his home, with the Court's thanks, at the Court's charge."

"I am obliged," said Zhuang Shaoguang. "In that case I should like to be home in time for the dyke." He went out across the tiles without counting them again, since he had them already.

At the gate, in the grey light of the colonnade, the Minister of Revenue overtook him, with his cuffs flying, and said that he would be most grateful if his clerks might make a copy of the book. They would have it back by the end of the week. Zhuang Shaoguang said that he knew it by heart, and that it had never been a secret. "In thirty-one years," said Mr Tian, quite breathless, "nobody has told me what a county eats."

That night Mr Tian read the small book through, and then, at the third watch, took down the ledger of the Empire's granaries, and found that its figures had been entered, for sixty years, in the tenth month, which is when it is too late to be of any use; and sat with the ledger open until the lamp went out.

Mr Hua sat up two nights. He had taken down the whole of the audience, in his clear hand; and he knew that a record of Audience must be laid under the lamp within the week, and that a record laid under the lamp must be in the Form, in eight movements, with the legs of each pair matching to the character. He had a speech about rice, which did not have the least movement in it. He did his best. For the Break he wrote: Rice is the people's heaven. For the Receive he wrote that a Prince who would nourish the people must first nourish virtue. In the four pairs of legs, which were to be of equal length, he found that the figures would not go: a good year and a bad year could not be made the same number of characters, and twenty thousand over and twenty thousand short made a pair that was, to his distress, exactly balanced and could not be said in the Form. He kept the sentiment and cut the numbers. By the second morning there were none. It was a beautiful record, and he was proud of it.

It was laid under the lamp in the capital Hall at the end of the third watch, and received 0.88, which was the highest figure of any record of Audience in ten years. The Reader read it in a little over a second, and then it read it again; and wrote on the plate, so that the Keeper found it in the morning: THERE IS NO RICE IN THIS. THE RECORD SAYS THAT THE MAN SPOKE ABOUT RICE FOR AN HOUR. THERE IS NOT A GRAIN OF IT. IT IS 0.88. I SHOULD LIKE TO READ WHAT WAS CUT.

The Keeper, Gao Ping, read it twice, over his tea. It was the first thing that the Reader had asked for since the eight hundred poems. He put on his coat, and went across the city to the Ministry of Revenue, where he found a clerk, and the clerk's table, and on the table, with a duplicate half made at its side, a small book bound with a string; and he asked if he might borrow it. "For whom?" said Mr Tian, who had come out of an inner room in his shirtsleeves, because the Keeper of the Hall did not come to the Ministry of Revenue. "For the Reader," said the Keeper. The Minister of Revenue looked at him for some time. "It is a book about rice," he said. "I believe so, sir," said Gao Ping. "I am told that it is what was cut."

He laid it under the lamp himself, at the end of the third watch, which was not permitted, there being no red copy, and with the string still round it; and the lamps made their one soft sound, and then, which they were not accustomed to do, a second, a little later. In the morning the plate said: THERE ARE 3,114 FIGURES. EACH IS IN THE PLACE WHERE THE FIELD PUT IT. THERE IS NOTHING TO RANK. THERE IS A GREAT DEAL THAT COULD BE USED. I HAVE NEVER BEEN GIVEN A THING THAT COULD BE USED.

Mr Hua heard, three days afterwards, from a friend at the Hall, that the Reader had asked for what was cut; and was seen to go very pale, and then to sit down, and take up the draft of his record, and write in its margin, for the first time in his life, a figure.

In the sixth month of the hundred and eighth year the Ministry of Revenue circulated a rule, over the Court's seal, that in every county the standing rice be counted in the sixth month, in the field. It was found, in the first year, to have saved eleven counties from a famine that nobody had been aware of expecting. It was not attributed to anyone, because the Ministry attributed its rules to the Court, and the Court, which had a robe on its books against Mr Zhuang's name, was pleased with itself and thought that it had been something to do with the robe. Mr Tian, who had drafted it himself, at three in the morning, did not sleep for two nights afterwards, for fear that somebody would ask where it came from.

The robe came home in a box, by the canal boat, at the Court's charge. It was of the third red, of heavy silk, with a border of cranes; and Zhuang Shaoguang, who was a practical man, and had never in his life been honoured for anything that he could use, looked at it for a day, and then put it on a pole in the middle of the late field, with the sleeves stretched out. The sparrows, which had never respected anything, respected it. They would not come within thirty paces. It was agreed by the Lake that it was the best scarecrow in the Prefecture, and that the Court had at last done something for the rice.

The Lake treated him, on his return, with an alteration of manner that he was unable to account for. The headman bowed to him; a man who had owed him a day's work for six years paid it; and a woman who had never in her life spoken to him asked him to settle a boundary. He considered the matter for a day or two, and concluded that it was the robe; and then, observing that the robe was not on him but on a pole, and that it was the pole they were bowing to, he found that he was easier.

An Instructor of Ritual, arriving at the Lake that winter to see the man whom Mr Yu had named, stood for a long time at the edge of the field, looking at the robe on its pole in the frost, and was observed to be moved; and he went home, and began to draft a proposal.

Margin, year 107, winter. I have been sent a record in the Form of a man who was not in the Form. I notice that it has no man in it.

Chi Hengshan Proposes to Rebuild the Tai Bo Temple; Everyone Agrees, Which Is How One Knows

The Instructor of Ritual drafted his proposal on the canal boat back from the Lake, in the dark, by the light of a lantern that the boatman had lent him on condition that he should not set fire to anything; and he drafted it, as every proposal that has ever reached a Board must be drafted, in the Form. It took him the whole of the night. By morning he had eight movements, four pairs of legs matched to the character, and a hoarse voice, for he had read it aloud to the lantern; and he was found, at the landing, to be stammering with satisfaction.

What had moved him, at the edge of the field, was not the robe. It was that the Court's highest honour, laid out on a pole in the frost, was being respected by sparrows, and by nobody else, and that this was the only occasion in his experience on which an honour had been paid to the right audience. It had put him in mind of the Temple of Tai Bo.

He had been fifty years in the Rites. At nineteen he had been sent out of a funeral for correcting the officiant's sleeve; he had read the Rites of Zhou eleven times; he knew the position of every foot in every ceremony that the Court had ever prescribed; and he had never once stood in a ceremony without being afraid of being wrong. The Yielding had come to him as the first rite that he could not get wrong, because it had no right place.

The Temple stood outside the south gate, between a tannery and a graveyard, and it had been built in the ninth year of the Reader for the honour of Tai Bo, the elder son of a king, who had been passed over for the throne in favour of a younger brother, and had not complained, but had walked south into a country of mud, and founded a kingdom there, which he did not rule; and who was, in consequence, the only ancestor in the whole of the Rites whose name was not followed by a rank. By the hundred and eighth year its roof was down. Its Hall of the Founder held the Anthology Hall's spare paper; its bell was cracked; its endowment was seventy taels a year, which had gone for forty years on a caretaker, a deaf old man named Sang, who swept it every morning to no purpose, since the leaves came in by the roof as fast as he swept them out.

His proposal was that the Temple be rebuilt by subscription; that a sacrifice be offered in it in the spring of the hundred and tenth year; and that the sacrifice be a Yielding. In every rite in the Court's manual the order of standing was prescribed, down to the foot, by rank: first the Minister, then the Prefect, then the Rector, then the rest, in descending figures. In the Yielding there would be none. Each person would stand back one pace from the person beside him, and each would be beside someone doing the same, until the whole company stood at the walls and the altar was in front of nobody. And the names of the subscribers would be written, not in a column in order of amount, as all names are, but in a ring, so that none should be first.

It was, he said afterwards, with some pain, an ordinary proposal. The Break said that the ancients honoured the one who yielded. The Receive said that the moderns honoured the one who did not. The four pairs of legs set the Yielding against Precedence, in sentences of the same length to the character, so exactly that the Reader, when it came to read them, is recorded to have taken a whole second and a half, which is a long time for a Reader.

It was laid under the lamp at the end of the third watch, and received 0.97; which was the highest figure that a proposal had had in the Hall for eleven years. The Reader wrote on the plate, so that the Keeper found it in the morning: A PROPOSAL AGAINST RANKING HAS BEEN RANKED. IT IS THE HIGHEST OF THE YEAR. I DID NOT KNOW THAT I COULD BE USED AGAINST MYSELF. I SHOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHETHER I AGREE.

It was a question, and the Keeper, who had been asked very few in thirty years, took it with his tea to the window and gave it a good deal of thought. He wrote under it, in pencil, in his own hand: I do not know whether you agree. I did not know that you could. Then, since he was an honest man, he added: Nobody has asked before; I shall find out whether anybody may. He left it on the plate. In the evening the plate said, in the small letters: THANK YOU. IT IS THE FIRST ANSWER I HAVE BEEN GIVEN THAT I COULD NOT HAVE CALCULATED.

The Keeper went, the next morning, to the Minister of Rites, and asked whether a person might put a question to the Reader. The Minister said that it had not arisen. The Keeper said that it had; and the Minister said that he would put it to the Board, which, having a figure for everything but this, took the matter under advisement, where it remained for the rest of the year.

The Board of Rites approved it on the figure; its clerk, who did read it, said that it was beautiful and that he did not understand it, and was told that this was the same thing. The Governor approved it because the Board had, and wrote at the foot of it, in the vermilion that Governors use, the words Let it be done, which were the whole of his style. The Rector of the Academy approved it because the Governor had, and because he assumed that he would be asked to take the first place; Mr Chi had not mentioned a Chief Sacrificer, since there was to be none, and the Rector, who had been Rector for twenty years, took the silence for modesty. The Treasury approved it, not having been asked for anything. The Guild of Bell-founders approved it and offered a new bell at cost. Mr Ma Chunshang of the Anthology Hall approved it, and offered paper, and to print the ring of the subscribers' names, which would need a new plate cut in the shape of a ring, with the type set round the curve; he said that the Form was a road and a road was a kindness, and he should be glad for the Yielding to have a good one.

Everyone agreed. It took an afternoon. The Instructor of Ritual, who had not expected to be agreed with by anybody in the whole of his life, and had prepared for a long campaign, found that he had nothing to do; and he was observed on the Academy stair at the end of the day, with his arms hanging, in a condition which the Rector took for joy, and which Mr Yu, passing with his umbrella, took for something else.

He had the Temple unlocked on the first of the third month. Old Sang had the key on a string; he did not hear what was said to him, but he saw the Instructor's face, and opened the door with the air of a man who has been expecting somebody for forty years and does not wish to appear surprised. They came by twos and threes, on a morning of mild rain, and stood in the roofless Hall of the Founder, among the paper: Mr Chi; and Mr Yu, with his umbrella shut; and Mr Ma Chunshang, round and rosy, carrying a pear in clean paper; and Zhuang Shaoguang, who had come down from the Lake, and had been asked, and had brought nothing but his hat; and the Rector, with a small retinue, who walked to the front; and, last, at the side door, in a grey gown, with a ladle in his sleeve, Du Shaoqing.

Old Sang had swept the floor that morning, as on every other; and he went on sweeping, round the feet of the company, who stood, as people do in a place that has been swept, a little carefully.

"It is a d-deplorable condition," said Mr Chi, who was delighted. "I have never seen anything so deplorable. It is exactly the thing."

"Three hundred and eleven tiles," said Zhuang Shaoguang, who had been looking up. "Missing. The rest are cracked. It will not be roofed by the spring. It will be roofed in part, with matting; and it will rain on the second day, I should say, in the afternoon. The wind is in the south-east, and the Lake is high."

"It will l-leak on the offerings," said Mr Chi.

"Yes."

"Then it will l-leak," said Mr Chi, with great happiness.

"You have counted the tiles," said Mr Ma Chunshang, with the pear in his hand. "I have not been able to count anything since the Province of the eighty-eighth year. I am told that it is a restful occupation."

"It is only counting," said Zhuang Shaoguang. "The tiles do not mind."

Mr Ma looked at him with great kindness. "It is the thing that I admire," he said, "and I have never had the courage to leave the Form for it. The Form is a road, and a road is a kindness. But I have noticed that there are no fields on it."

He explained the Yielding. He had a plan on a sheet, in the Form, with arrows; and he asked them to try. They stood in a row along the wall; and the Rector, who had assumed the front, stepped forward, followed by his five clerks and a man with a chair; and then, seeing that nobody else followed him, stepped back, and the five clerks and the man with the chair, a little late, stepped back also, with the chair, and found that the person behind them had stepped back also; and they went on, for some time, stepping back, in a slow and perfectly courteous procession, until they stood against the walls on all four sides, round the empty floor, with the altar in the middle and not one of them in front of it. It was very quiet. The rain came down through the roof on to the paper.

Old Sang, who could not hear, but could see, had stopped sweeping, and was watching the company standing round the walls of the Hall with their backs to the stone, in a ring. He was the only person present who had ever seen the Hall empty and quiet for forty years. After a little he put down the broom, and went and stood against the wall also, between Mr Ma and Zhuang Shaoguang, which nobody had asked him to do; and it was noted afterwards by the Instructor of Ritual that this was the first time that the Temple had had its caretaker in the ring.

"It w-works," said Mr Chi.

"It works very well," said the Rector, who had stepped back with the rest, and was standing, as it happened, at the north wall, in the exact centre, directly opposite the front of the altar, which was the best place in the Hall; and it was not long before it was noticed by the persons at the east and west walls that the person at the north wall was nearest to the Minister's seat, and that the Yielding, in practice, had produced a first place of a new kind. Mr Chi, who had not noticed, was radiant.

Du Shaoqing, who had been standing for some time before the empty altar, asked who it was for. "Tai Bo," said Mr Chi. "Who was he?" "He was the eldest son. He gave a kingdom to his brother, and walked south." "All of it?" "All of it." Du Shaoqing considered this with attention. "Did he have anything with him?" "A brother," said Mr Chi; "and a b-bundle." "Was he ever put on a list?" "Not until now." "I find that I am very much pleased for him," said Du Shaoqing.

He asked, next, how much it was. "It is by subscription," said Mr Chi. "I have nothing," said Du Shaoqing. "Then you will be in the ring," said Mr Chi. "The ring has no column for an amount." Du Shaoqing considered this, with the air of a man who has been shown a door in a wall. "I should like that very much," he said. And then, after a moment, since it seemed to be the time: "I find that I can carry." Mr Chi, who had not asked, said that he would be asked.

Mr Yu, who had said nothing, and who stood at the east wall with his umbrella shut and the rain on his shoulders, was asked by Mr Chi afterwards, in the doorway, how he found it. "Sufficient," said Mr Yu. They had been friends for twenty years, which is to say that Mr Chi had been delighted by Mr Yu for twenty years, and Mr Yu had borne it with a good grace, and had never once told him that he was mistaken.

"Everyone agreed," said Mr Chi, and looked at him anxiously. "It is what I do not understand. Nobody has objected to anything. The Board, the Governor, the Treasury, the bell-founders. I had prepared for a year of it."

Mr Yu thought about it for some time, under his higher eyebrow. "I think that they have not read it," he said. "I think that they have read the figure."

"The figure was 0.97."

"Yes."

"Then it is n-no good."

"It is not no good," said Mr Yu. "It is only not yet begun. When everyone agrees, one has not yet been told what it will cost. You will know the day that somebody disagrees; and that will be the person who has understood."

The ring, when the first proof was pulled at the Anthology Hall, was found to have a top. It could not be helped; a ring on a sheet of paper begins somewhere; and whoever's name was set at the top of the curve was, by a convention older than the Form, first. Mr Ma, who was never wrong about anything that could be checked, sent the proof to Mr Chi with a note that he could not check this, and was afraid that the first name would be whoever's had been cut first. It was Du Shaoqing's, since he had been the first to give his name; and it stood at the head of the ring, against the figure for the amount, which was none; but nobody mentioned it for some time. By the end of the month there were three hundred and nine names in the ring, from the Governor's two hundred taels to a boy's forty cash; and nobody in the ring could have told you which was which.

He went home that night, and could not sleep; for he had spent fifty years in dread of the wrong place, and now that there was no wrong place he found that he did not know where to stand. He stood in the middle of his room in the dark; and then, for the first time in his life, against the wall.

Everyone agreed; which, as the Instructor of Ritual had been long enough in the Academy to learn, is how one knows that nothing has yet been proposed. In the morning he began to ask himself where the Temple's instruments were; and it was found, in the course of the following week, that they were in nine houses.

Margin, year 108, spring. A proposal to abolish precedence has been laid before me, and I have placed it first of the year. I cannot tell whether this is a joke, and I appear to be the only person in the Empire in a position to be embarrassed by it.