Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/117



and as he watched the sun rapidly sinking below the horizon, and travelling a thousand li in the course of a single night, he heaved a profound sigh. "Alas!" he said, "my virtue is far from perfect; for I am still susceptible to the influences of this sweet music. Succeeding generations will not fail to censure me for this fault."

What! King Mu endowed with supernatural powers, think you? He was nothing but a man, able to exhaust the pleasures of which his body was capable, and then after a hundred years to depart this life, while the world imagined that he had ascended bodily from view.

The Dreamer Awake.

The philosopher Lieh-tzŭ said, "The divine men of old never thought when they were awake, and never dreamed when they were asleep."

In a corner of the world towards the extreme West there is a state, the frontiers of which border upon I don't know where. The inhabitants mostly sleep; they wake only once in fifty days, when they believe that the dreams they have been experiencing constitute their real life, and that the realities they see in their waking hours are non-existent.

There was a wealthy man of the Chou dynasty, named Yin Ta-chih, who kept his servants constantly at work, morning, noon, and night, without allowing them a moment's rest. Among them was one old fellow, who, having used up all his strength, was at last entirely worn out. But his master only made him work the harder; so that all day long he groaned and panted over his tasks, and when night came was so thoroughly exhausted that he slept as soundly as a log. Then his mental equilibrium became upset, and he used to dream every night that he was the king of a state, high exalted over the heads of the people, with all the affairs of his realm upon his hands; roaming and taking his pleasure amid palaces and temples, and giving free rein to all his passions and desires, so that his enjoyment was beyond compare. During his waking hours he was nothing but a hard-worked drudge, and