Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/178

 full-fed abbot, who was never seen without a bright-green horse-tail, which he used constantly to keep his saintly person free from flies. Indeed, the graceful waving and manipulation of a feather-brush or horsetail is cultivated as an art, and forms part of the stock-in-trade of many a Chinese petit maître. But the ramifications of this subject are too numerous to be followed out in detail on the present occasion. We might describe the use to which the instrument is put as a head-dress; for there are pictures to be seen in which an actual feather-brush is represented as worn on the top of the head, very much in the same way as a soldier wears a plume. The digression, however, would lead to others, and we must forego it. We will only add that the feather-duster has been made of use on several occasions to point a moral, if not adorn a tale, by Chinese moralists, imperial and other. "The superior man renews himself day by day;" "The sage incessantly shakes the dust of the world from off him;" "The purity of the soul can only be preserved by perpetual care;" such are some of the virtuous if somewhat platitudinarian aphorisms which have been taken from the writings of the ancients, and playfully used by modern essayists to reflect on brooms and feather-brushes all the grace and dignity which cluster round the pages of classic lore.