Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/216

 On their arrival they found that the officers had taken old Tsiu into their charge, and had made him kneel down on the stone pavement in front of the inner entrance. The jailers, who had been heavily bribed by Chang, had got their implements of torture in readiness, and were anxiously waiting to commence operations. Just then the magistrate came in, and the examination began.

"What place do you belong to, wizard?" bawled the "father-and-mother-of-his-people," roughly. "What do you mean by coming here and corrupting honest folk with your sorceries? and how many confederates have you?"

These words sounded to Tsiu like a sudden explosion of gunpowder in the dark, and he did not know what to reply. At last he said—

"The insignificant man is a native of the village of Chang-lo; he is not a wizard, and does not come from anywhere else; and he knows nothing of any sorceries." "What!" roared the magistrate; "will you deny that only the day before yesterday you conjured a number of broken flowers on to their stems again? What do you call that, pray, but the black art?"

When Tsiu heard that, he knew directly that Chang was at the bottom of the whole affair; so he began at the beginning, and told the magistrate everything that had happened from the time of Chang's drunken outrage to the visit of the beneficent little fairy. But the magistrate, whose nature prompted him to take a distorted and one-sided view of everything, would not believe a word of it.

"A very ingenious tale, indeed," he said, with a brutal