Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/530

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while the fourth or upper side gives space for teachers' quarters and class-rooms.

But in one court in place of the teachers' quarters there is a high pillardpillared [sic] shrine-room, where behind red curtains sits the massive wooden statue of Chü Fu Tsz, an object of reverence as the intellectual father of the race of students cultured here. This room comes just in front of the grotto where the image of the white deer stands. An inscription in huge characters hangs above his throne and on either side are tablets to the memory of his distinguished disciples.

Passing into the adjacent court through a circular doorway we stand in the sanctum sanctorum of the college, in the very midst of its buildings, occupied by a temple with great double doors smeared with the ubiquitous Chinese red. Dark and damp, the main hall of this temple offers shelter to large images of Confucius, Mencius and fifteen of the famous disciples of the sage. This image of Confucius is rather contrary to custom, and is perhaps accounted for by the Buddhistic inclinations of Chü Fu Tsz. Besides this crude wooden image, there is also a portrait of the sage, one of the only three reputed to have been made. It is engraved life-size on a huge slab of dark slate, and is evidently the product of no mean skill.

In a small room in front of this Confucian temple is enshrined, curiously enough, a tutelar god. Formerly this room was supposed to bestow remarkable success in the examinations for high degrees upon all those who had studied in it, because of the literary god standing in a little pavilion across the brook, who holds in his hand a pencil which points directly to that room, and who guided the pen of the favored