_Li-Chi_ (_sings_)--
The poor soul sat sighing by a rum-looking tree,
Sing, once a green willow;
But now all its leaves smell of base L _s._ _d._;
Sing willow, willow, willow!
The old stream runs by her, not with the old tones,
Sing willow, willow, willow!
But, churned by coarse paddles, it plashes and groans;
Sing willow, willow, willow!
_Chang._ Ah, yellow and irradiant sunflower of my soul's secret shrine,
sing not thus dolefully, I entreat thee. What avails the permission to
escape awhile our old ornithological metamorphosis, and revisit once
again the glimpses of the Mandarin's country seat, the pavilion, the
peach and the orange-tree, the elegant wooden fence, the bridge, the
boat, and, above all, the willow, only to sing songs whose
spirit-cleaving cadences sting thy CHANG more than ever did the angry
Mandarin's whip-lash?
_Li-Chi (mournfully)._ What, indeed? But O, sublimated saffron-bag of
my spirit's idolatry, who can help weeping at sight of _this_?
_Chang (reading)._ "National and International Amalgamated Bank!" O,
mighty but much-too-free-with-the-whip-hand-of-parental-authority
Mandarin of the Middle Kingdom, what would you have thought of this
transformation?
_Li-Chi._ Papa was impetuous. Our--our elopement angered him. But
Telegraph-poles, Telephone Exchanges, River Steamers, Banks and Blazing
Posters!!--Alas!!!
_Chang (hotly)._ By the isolated button of Celestial supereminence, it
is too bad! What _can_ LI HUNG CHANG, that dragon-claw of the throne,
that amber-souled prop of imperial perpendicularity be about, I wonder?
_Li-Chi (meditatively)._ We--e--ell,--perhaps he knows, after all.
_Chang._ What meaneth the tintinnabulant tea-blossom of my trivial and
ephemeral personality?
_Li-Chi (archly)._ The "Heathen Chinee," as the wanton Western scribe
insolently calls him, is indeed "peculiar," as perchance even Count
EUGENE STANISLOW KOSTKA DE MITKIEWICZ and Mr. JAY-GOULD, HOOD, MACKAY
the multi-millionnaire, and BARKER Brothers the Bankers, New York
Syndicates and Philadelphian Silver Rings, may yet discover as clearly
and completely as did _Bill Nye_ and _Truthful James_ of the ribald
ballad.
_Chang (admiringly)._ Verily even the orbicular contractility of
dexter-optical semi-closure becometh those almond eyes, oh!
flesh-enshrined opium-ecstasy of my most transcendental inwardness.
_Li-Chi (smartly)._ I should think it did, indeed! A wink is as good as
a nod to a blind lover. "Melican Man" is very 'cute and enterprising;
but whether he'll find it quite so easy as he fancies to "run" the
Celestial Kingdom, or "exploit" the Flowery Land, remains as the
never-sufficiently-to-be-commended-and-left-carefully-unread
KUNG-FOO-TZE would say, "to be duskily adumbrated in the spirit-speculum
of the yet To-be."
_Chang._ Quite so. Still, O million-berried mulberry-tree of my mean and
inconsiderable soul-garden, to have our own secular love-legend and its
many-centuried Scene thus sordidly transmogrified, cannot, O, shining
one of my spirit's crepuscular gloom. O, beneficent betel-nut of my
supersensual Palate"--
_Li-Chi._ Well, CHANG, after all, novelty hath its charm--after a cycle
or two, you know. Marquis TSENG talks about "the awakening of China." As
if there was ever a Celestial who, for all his childlikeness and
blandness, was not very wide-awake indeed! Why, LI-CHI, if ever _we_ had
our time over again, _do_ you think that transmutation into a pair of
turtle-doves,--bird-beatitudes, my CHANG, are _so_ limited!--would form
the acme of our mutual aspirations?
_Chang._ Well, per--haps not, LI-CHI.
Better fifty years of Europe
Than a Cycle of Cathay,--
--as turtle-doves, you know. Still, that chuckling and cavorting
American fowl, that two-headed and vulturine Russo-Polish Eagle, do not
quite fit into the Mongolian Arcadia of the Willow-pattern plate; now do
they? We have fallen, lily of my life, upon sordid, and subversive, and
sceptical times, when millions of taels move our Mandarins to Modernism,
when Silver Rings and Syndicates, can set up a Party of Progress in the
Realm of the Immutable, and when doubts have been thrown by shallow
scribes upon the existence of the Great Wall of China itself!
_Li-Chi (shuddering)._ Dreadful, dear! Let's turn back into turtle-doves
at once, and coo ourselves into truly Celestial obliviousness of this
colossal Yankee _coup_, which threatens--perchance prematurely--to fix
for all time _this_ preposterously Western and barbaric picture as the
Willow Pattern of the Future! [_They do so._
* * * * *
[Illustration: SAGACITY.]
_Countryman._ "FI' POUNDS TOO MUCH FOR HIM? HE'S A WON'ERFUL GOOD
SPORTIN' DAUG, SIR! WHY HE COME TO A DEAD PINT IN THE STREET, SIR, CLOSE
AG'IN A OL' GEN'LEMAN, THE OTHER DAY--'FUST O' SEPTEMBER IT WAS,
SIR!--AN' THE GEN'LEMAN TOLD ME ARTERWARDS AS HIS NAME WERE
'PARTRIDGE'!"
_Customer._ "YOU DON'T SAY SO!" [_Bargain struck!_
* * * * *
"PAYING THEIR SHOT."
A PARTY of excursionists from the Tyne thought it a pleasant way of
spending a Bank-holiday to go wantonly shooting swarms of sea-birds on
the Farne Islands. When remonstrated with by the more humane man in
charge, they considered it still greater "sport" to threaten to push an
oar down his throat, and make a target of him. These sportive souls
indeed managed amongst them to "hit his felt hat and graze his left
thumb" with shot. But when 239 of them were summoned under the Wild
Birds Act, and had to pay fines and expenses to the tune of some L70,
they probably modified their notion of the nature and claim of "Sport,"
and found that "paying the shot" in that sense was the least pleasant
part of shooting. Some of them were probably left without "a shot in the
locker." A few more such wholesome lessons, and the "Cad with a Gun,"
the "Brute with a Double-Barrel," may no longer be found depopulating
Nature's feathered preserves and disgracing the name of honest Sport.
* * * * *