Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/35

 with you. The vilest tyrants never went to such lengths as this. When the world hears of it, all hearts will be estranged from you, and not a man will come near the state of Ts'in. Your servant presumes to tremble for your Majesty. This is all I have to say."

So saying he stripped off his clothes, and placed himself in readiness to be taken up with the pincers and put into the cauldron to be boiled. But the King, descending from his dais, stretched forth his hand and stopped him. "Rise, Master," said he, "and put on your robes again. I am willing to receive instruction at your hands." Then he raised him to an honourable place among his counsellors, and set off himself in his royal chariot to fetch the Dowager from her place of banishment, leaving the seat on his left vacant, in order that she might occupy it on the return journey. The lion's mouth was stopped for that time, and the King, rendered uneasy, probably, by the warnings of Mao Chiao, promised that he would not be more truculent than he could help in future.

This incident occurred in the ninth year of his reign, and seventeen years before his assumption of the Imperial title. The year afterwards Lü Pu-wei was banished to the state of Chao, where he led a miserable and discontented life, eventually putting an end to his own existence by poison just twelve years after the accession of his son to the throne. His fate, compared with that of the other actors in the tragedy, was merciful in the extreme.

Ten years after this the Queen Dowager also died. She appears from all accounts to have been a commonplace character, who would have been harmless enough had she not been made the tool of an audacious and unscrupulous adventurer. Her ruling passion seems to have been