Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/176

 in the gold-topped cane a civilised form of the ponderous bludgeon once wielded by our forefathers in Scandinavia.

Now there is no commoner object in any house in China, foreign or native, than the feather-brush. It is not very ornamental, nor is it so practically useful, perhaps, as the homely cotton duster used by the ingenuous housemaids of England. Its principal value to the Chinese "boy" lies in the fact of its being a regular and unfailing means of squeezing his master to the extent of at least half a dollar or so a month. That, however, by the way. Even when not thus misused, it occupies what may be called a subordinate, if not menial, position in the household. But it has a history—an ancestry. There was a time when the feather-brush—or its remote progenitor, to speak more accurately—had not been put to the base use of dusting furniture in the remarkably imperfect manner practised by the A-choys and A-lings of modern days. It bore a part, and a very honourable part, in the ancient chivalry of China, being no less than a recognised standard for the mustering of soldiers to battle. An allusion is made to it by Chuang-tzŭ, the St. Paul of Taoism, two hundred years before Christ, who tells us that when the great military leader Sûn, standing on an eminence which overlooked the plain, waved on high his plume of feathers, the men of the State of Ying rushed with one accord into the field and put themselves in battle array. It was, in fact, an ancient military signal, and used, perhaps, much as a flag is used to-day, as a sign for mustering; a bell being struck where now we brandish the flag of truce. There is something strange in the fact of an instrument so honourable being degraded from the battle-field to the