As for me, I have been all my life bitten by the collector’s mania, and so the wings of my Pegasus have many feathers; for my house, and even my gardens, are full of curious odds and ends, the spoil of many lands. On the terrace standing sentry at the entrance to the house are two huge bronze Kylins (in Pekingese, Chih Ling), representations of the mystic beast which was seen last at the birth of Confucius, and will not reappear until ten thousand years shall have elapsed from that date. [Illustration: SCENE IN THE AUTHOR’S GARDEN. [_To face p. 6._] The male has a single horn and is very fierce, but not more so than his hornless mate, which, with her cruel tusks, grins defiance at the world. Just such another pair in the Imperial Park of the Ten Thousand Longevities at Yuen Ming Yuen used to raise my wonder fifty years ago. Built into the wall of one of the two little gazebos which are at the east and west ends of my terrace are two bricks—the one rough and rugged, sun-dried and splashed with the mortar of more than two thousand years since, from the Great Wall of China at Ku Pei Kŏu; the other white, smooth and richly glazed from the famous Porcelain Tower of Nanking, which was destroyed by the Tai Ping rebels some sixty years ago, before they were overtaken by the Vengeance of Gordon and “the Ever-Victorious Army.” Shall I ever forget the tramp of a couple of miles under an August sun in 1865 with that huge brick from the Great Wall seeming to bite into my aching shoulder? Over against the little summer-house, guarding the entrance to the garden from the attacks of evil spirits, are small statues of the Ni-ō, the two kings whose ugliness is enough to scare away any inauspicious demons who might be about. They must miss the ritual of their own country where the pious pilgrim, having written his prayer on to a scrap of paper, chews it into a pellet, and spits it at the sacred figure. If it sticks, all is well, and the prayer will be heard; if it falls to earth, the fates will be unkind—so outside a fashionable temple the two gods are bespattered all over with an eruption of moist pellets. Here from that holy rite they are immune.