Page:The Chinese Boy and Girl.djvu/123

 what he would do in summer. He studied by the light reflected from the snow.

"Perhaps," he went on as he changed the form, "he followed the example of another who studied by the pale light of the moon."

"What does that represent?" I asked him pointing to a child with a bowl in his hand who looked as if he might have been going to the grocer's.

"Oh, that boy is going to buy wine."

The Chinese have never yet realized what a national evil liquor may become. They have little wine shops in the great cities, but they have no drinking houses corresponding to the saloon, and it is not uncommon to see a child going to the wine shop to fetch a bowl of wine. The Buddhist priest indulges with the same moderation as the official class or gentry. Indeed most of the drunkenness we read about in Chinese books is that of poets and philosophers, and in them it is, if not commended, at least not condemned. The attitude of literature towards them is much like that of Thackeray towards the gentlemen of his day.

The child constructed the picture of a Buddhist priest, who, with staff in hand, and a mug of wine, was viewing the beautiful mountains in the distance. He then changed it to one in which an

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