Puslapio vaizdai
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liberate elderly men, whose the associations of shingling.

ancestors were probably burghers when the town-levy had to help man the walls. Very few of the important buildings gave me any special pleasure: but the tiled roofs were a joy all of these two sunny days: whether you looked on a mass of them, huddled inconceivably close where the old town ran down to the waterway (a portion which the restricted wall of 1542 left outside its ring), or saw them singly, each by itself, a sheet of rich mottled colour for which I tried many comparisons. Where the old tiles had been patched and cemented together with repointing, the effect was like that of some very old Persian rug, low in tone: and it was curious to observe how even new roofs were being graded down by the weather in that moist air into a sober harmony with the rest. But chance showed me a much closer resemblance. Outside the citadel some of the great elms which grow on the ramparts had been felled, and the trunks lay there in the sun, the rough bark crevassed with innumerable fissures, and the dull white where where the branches had been lopped making patches already subdued in tone by the exuding sap. To run your eye from these up to the old roofs beyond them was to carry it through a series of gradations, in which colour and texture alike were of a piece. It was as if this town, once all woodwork, had never wholly got away from

Against this quiet richness every here and there stuck out some piece of yellow wallflower, and brought the note of spring across the buildings as clearly as the green buds called it among rugged trunks.

Outside the walls, where slipping earth gave shrubs a foothold on the rampart, sloe-blossom was a delicate mist of white : and on the eastward face, where a little watercourse runs in the valley, there was a hazel thicket. Here I heard the deep chuckle of a nightingale, trying his throat, and after dark I walked the ramparts, hoping for the full song; but it was too cold or too early: an owl screeched, and down below a strong-lunged frog croaked like a water-bird. Up there in the dark one got amazingly the sense of separation. To the left, narrow lanes ran into the town, with lampions here and there, and lighted windows, all safe and snug to the right, two hundred feet below, misty and dark, was the unwalled and unenclosed that which the town walls had to guard against. An officer passing alone on the ramparts, and later, a soldier

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the only two persons I met,

increased the feeling that one was still in a defended fortress.

Another time, perhaps, I may go back to Montreuil and explore in detail: but for that little holiday, sunlight and the pervading strangeness sufficed me. I never basked more

pleasantly than on its ramparts in the sun; I never ate in surroundings more to my liking than in the inn's diningroom, on the sanded floor, looking into the courtyard. Vines on the walls were trained over the whole court in a net, and the buds on the hard cordage shone in the sunlight, and brought the spring's quickening in among those walls. Nothing is knottier or more gnarled than the vine trunk: incredible that from it should issue what in all vegetable nature is most delicate, most tender, and most precious the sun-warmed grape. The French peasant stock is like that here in Picardy, at its roughest and toughest: yet what fruit it yields! Even in Picardy they have what makes the vital difference between Northern France and Southern England-just the extra share of sun. The volets everywhere on the houses tell of it: so does the burnished patine on the roofs. As I sat and drank my coffee there, a high roof with two rows of mansard windows faced me, all sparkling in the spring air: everything was so clear, so clean, so sharp: the court between its four sides was a little well

full of sunlight: you could dip a pail into it. France gave me sunlight to drink that Easter-time.

And though the hotel rooms were full of English guests, it was not tourist - ridden. A Frenchman could come in without feeling that he intruded. They came indeed very constantly, for the place is at a great road junction: the Route Nationale from Arras meets here the Route Nationale from Paris to Boulogne. But your motorist is always in a hurry. Let him scorch ahead and leave to quiet unhurried people the enjoyment of quiet unhurried places like Montreuil-sur-Mer. Such folk, when they have had their fill and depart satisfied, can observe from a leisurely train how a tapestry of cultivated fields and willows and poplar-trees masked from them, as they came, the flatness of the old sea-floor, where the tideway, now silted up, carried the Vikings and their ships to sack the monastery of Saint Saulve some thirteen centuries ago. Even in these times, high springs force the water up the Canche till they stop the little mills working, and remind Montreuil that it once was on the sea.

AT THE SIGN OF THE LAUGHING GODS.

BY J. O. P. BLAND.

THERE are two morals to this story. One, that the long arm of coincidence can easily put a girdle about this little planet of ours; two, that in China dead men's bones often count for more than the limbs of the living.

The story itself, which had lain submerged for thirty years in some hidden backwater of memory's wayward tide, came back to me, all unexpectedly, as such things do, one afternoon during a recent visit to Peking. I was riding by myself that day, rambling without any definite purpose among the quiet narrow streets which lie between the Hatamen Ta-chieh and the eastern wall of the Tartar city; and my mood was of the sentimental reminiscent kind, which endeavours to recapture something of the fragrance and glamour of bygone happy days.

Those who in middle age revisit the glimpses of joyous suns which shone upon their primrose paths of youth and wanderlust, usually find something bitter-sweet in the savour produced by the sights and sounds of old familiar places, by the whispering ghosts of vanished years, that gather at every turn of half-forgotten roads. Mingled with a wistful melancholy of retrospection and heart-stirring memories of the VOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCCIV.

past, there lurks an involuntary subtle complacency, something like unsophisticated pride in a personal achievement, in the reflection that we ourselves still survive and have our being, still fill our little place in the sun. I know that as I rode that day down the Kou-lan hutung, that narrow street between mysterious high-walled dwellings which I came to know by heart in the old days of the Customs Students' Mess, something of this feeling rose unbidden to the surface of a stream of crowded memories. I thought of all the paroxysms and perils of change through which Peking had passed since first I saw it, in the yellow haze of an autumn duststorm, thirty-six years before. I thought of all the Redbuttoned mighty ones, of whom our Chinese teachers used to speak with such awe, princes and viceroys and governors, whose names are now as swiftly fading shadows on a ruined wall.

With these tumultuous years, all the might, majesty, and dominion of the Great Pure dynasty had been swept away, its forbidden sanctuaries invaded, and its high altars defiled; and yet here was I, an insignificant spectator of that drama, tranquilly revisiting the glory that once was China's capital-a comfortable pilgrim, 2 K 2

hoping to feel once again some thing of the tingling vividness of sensation, the throbbing joie de vivre, indissolubly associated in my mind with every early memory of Peking.

And in this narrow street, where no swift tide of traffic has ever run, the sights and sounds that met me on my way all contributed to a pleasing sense of stability, to the illusion of a little oasis of ancient ways inviolate in a wilderness of change. At the red-lacquered gateway of a Bannerman's ancestral home stood one of the old springless carts with a great Szechnen mule between the shafts; within the doorway, squatting on their hams, its driver and the gatekeeper were chatting over their long pipes. To the tinkling of brass cymbals, a pedlar of sweetmeats was making his leisurely round, and chubby children snatched a fearful joy as they gambled for sugar-plums with the "lucky bamboos" of his jingling-box. Overhead, a flock of blue-grey pigeons was swiftly circling, and the soft crescendo of their tiny bamboo pipes, as they came up into the wind, sounded, as of old, like the sighing of unhappy household gods. To the outward eye hardly a landmark of the old days was changed. Beneath the sign of the "Prospering Winds" two lads were mixing coal- dust with yellow clay, just as two, other lads had done thirty years before; and at the end of the hutung, where it joins the street of Filial Piety, my

nose gratefully acknowledged, as of old, the fragrance of sandalwood and pine emanating from the Wang Chia timberyard, which stands opposite to the Sign of the Laughing Gods.

It was the sight of this old sign-board, a weather-beaten thing of black and gold lacquer, which suddenly recalled to my mind the story of its owner, Kao Shih-lan, maker of Lohan, Buddhas, and other graven images, who, when first I knew him, was the bête noire of the Students' Mess, and the undisguised foe of every "foreign devil" who passed his door.

Later, when by the grace of his own gods we had established relations of friendship as nearly intimate as they can ever be between East and West, I came to learn the cause of his grudge against Europeans, and held him justified. Now, remembering his story, and many an hour of good talk passed with him in those far-distant days, I stopped my pony at the door of the timber-yard, desiring to find out from them, before knocking at Kao's door, into whose hands his business had passed. As he was a middle-aged man when I had last seen him in 1890, I reckoned that by now he must either have been gathered to his fathers, or at all events have given up work.

The timber-yard people told me that he had died in 1900the year of the Boxer rising,and that the business had then passed to his second son, the elder having also lost his life

during that time of trouble. I wondered whether the old man and his first-born had heard the call of the wild and taken a hand in the siege of the Legations, but it was best to ask no questions. Kao Shih-lan was dead, and although, but for me, that second son would not have lived to worship at his grave, I felt no inclination to introduce myself to him, or to evoke the manifestations of gratitude and filial piety which the occasion would have required. To tell the truth, although I could not have expected to find old Kao alive, to learn that he had been dead for twenty years lent a distasteful flavour of Old Mortality to my tranquil cud of meditation. The news induced a Rip Van Winkle feeling, intensified by the apparent immutability of the scene in which he had always been associated in my mind as a conspicuous figure. There was the old sign-board, swinging in the wind; behind the gatescreen, a glimpse of the little courtyard with its slumbering dogs, and of the shop, with its front of cunning lattice-work and windows, half paper and half glass-everything just as it was when first I saw it. And there across the way, pestiferous as ever, was the open drain, in which the present owner of the shop so nearly came to an untimely end. All this immutability of inanimate things gave one an uncanny feeling.

Letting my pony choose his

own leisurely way, I rode on towards the East Gate, but my thoughts remained in the little inner room at the Sign of the Laughing Gods, where, after the incident of the open drain, I had smoked many a pipe of peace with the maker of graven images. It was there that he told me the story which accounted for his hostility to foreigners. Very vividly, as I rode, came moving pictures of those half-forgotten days.

Amongst these, one of the most distinct is that of my first meeting with Kao Shihlan. I had often seen him before, of course, scowling at us students as we rode past his door; but though we all longed for a casus belli, none of us had ever had speech with him.

One afternoon, however, several of us were going on a picnic to the Princess's Tomb it was the holiday of the Feast of Lanterns, and just as we passed Kao's door a firecracker exploded right in front of Bessenthal, our German colleague, bringing about the sudden separation which invariably followed when his mount shied. Muddy and wrathful, Bessenthal burst in upon Kao with none of the sangfroid essential in bringing a Chinaman to book, and his subsequent moral collapse was painful to witness. Beginning in voluble Chinese, his command of the language rapidly gave out, and what had been intended for an eloquent fulmination tailed off into senseless sound and fury. (At the best of times Chinese

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