The historian goes on to record that the two armies suspended hostilities at the command of their leaders, and that, the emperor and his rebel subject having engaged in single combat, Yuentsoong was victorious, and returned to his capital with the formidable enemy whose life he had spared, riding beside him like a brother. The conqueror’s career, for several years after this, seems to have been a series of exploits of personal valor; and the Tartar prince shared in all his dangers and pleasures, his inseparable friend. It was during this period of romantic friendship that the events occurred which have made Yuentsoong one of the idols of Chinese poetry. By the side of a lake in a distant province of the empire, stood one of the imperial palaces of pleasure, seldom visited, and almost in ruins. Hither, in one of his moody periods of repose from war, came the conqueror Yuentsoong, for the first time in years separated from his faithful Szema. In disguise, and with only one or two attendants, he established himself in the long silent halls of his ancestor Tsinchemong, and with his boat upon the lake, and his spear in the forest, seemed to find all the amusement of which his melancholy was susceptible. On a certain day in the latter part of April, the emperor had set his sail to a fragrant south wind, and, reclining on the cushions of his bark, watched the shore as it softly and silently glided past, and, the lake being entirely encircled by the imperial forest, he felt immersed in what he believed to be the solitude of a deserted paradise. After skirting the fringed sheet of water in this manner for several hours, he suddenly observed that he had shot through a streak of peach-blossoms floating from the shore, and at the same moment he became conscious that his boat was slightly headed off by a current setting outward. Putting up his helm, he returned to the spot, and beneath the drooping branches of some luxuriant willows, thus early in leaf, he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which, but for the floating blossoms it brought to the lake, would have escaped the notice of the closest observer. The emperor now lowered his sail, unshipped the slender mast, and betook him to the oars; and, as the current was gentle, and the inlet wider within the mouth, he sped rapidly on through what appeared to be but a lovely and luxuriant vale of the forest. Still, those blushing betrayers of some flowering spot beyond extended like a rosy clew before him; and with impulse of muscles swelled and indurated in warlike exercise, the swift keel divided the besprent mirror winding temptingly onward, and, for a long hour, the royal oarsman untiringly threaded this sweet vein of the wilderness.