A Woman In China. Mary Gaunt

the ruler required to attend upon him. There were a few trees, leafless then in March, but there was nothing to spoil the dignity and repose of every line. A great mind surely conceived this entrance, and great must have been the minds that kept it so severely simple. If it be the heart of a nation then do I understand. The people who streamed along the causeway, who roamed over the worn brick pavement, had, as a rule, delicate, finely formed hands though they were but humble craftsmen. If the hands of the poorest be so fine, is it any wonder that the picked men of such a people, their very heart, conceived such a mighty pile? There were more, longer and gloomier tunnels, admitting to a still greater courtyard, a courtyard that must be at least a quarter of a mile across, with the same causeway of worn stones that cry out the tale of the sufferings of the forgotten slaves, who hewed them and dragged them into place, the same grey pavement of bricks, the same tall smooth red walls, crowned over the gateway with temples, rising one story after another till the tiled roof cuts the sky. And through a third set of tunnels we came into a third courtyard, the courtyard where the obsequies were being held. The third courtyard was spacious as Trafalgar Square, and round three sides was a wide raised platform of stone reached by broad and easy ramps, and all across it ran a canal held in by marble banks, crossed by graceful bridges, and every one of the uprights, made of white marble, was crowned by a figure that I took for the representation of a flame; but those, who know, tell me it is meant to represent a cloud, and is part of the dragon symbolism. When marble is the medium by which so light a thing as a cloud is represented it must be very finely done indeed, when one outside the national thought, such as I, sees in that representation a flame. Two colossal bronze monsters with grinning countenances and curly manes, conventional lions, mounted on dragon-carved pedestals, stand before the entrance to the fourth temple or hall of audience, and here was what the crowd had come to see, the lighthearted, cheerful, merry crowd, that were making high holiday, here was the altar to the dead.

      Overhead were the tiled roofs, and of all the colours of the rainbow surely none could have been chosen better than the golden brown of those tiles to harmonise with the clear blue of the glorious sky above it, no line to cut it could have been so appropriate as the gentle sweep of the curve of a Chinese roof. There was a little grass growing on the roofs, sere and withered, but a faint breeze just stirred its tops, and it toned with the prevailing golden brown in one glorious beauty. Where else in the world could one get such an effect? Only in Australia have I seen such a sky, and there it was never wedded to such a glow of colour as that it looks down upon in Peking. The men who built this palace in a bygone age, built broadly, truly, for all time.