Our quarters were ideal. Our dining-room was an open pavilion, surrounded by a pond and a rockery which looked as if, like poetry, it had been born not made, feathered with ferns and clothed with a profusion of mosses; high trees sheltered us from the scorching sun and a pond fed by an icy fountain cooled our drinks to perfection. Here we led the simple life—rose and bathed in the pond soon after daybreak—a frugal breakfast at eight—work till three—then dinner—after that a ride or a scramble over the beauty-haunted mountains, peering into the homes of fairies and wood-nymphs and heavenly beings; back for tea at eight or nine—a smoke—and then bed, to be awakened long before the sun by the silvery tinkling of the bell for matins. Sometimes in the dead hours of the night, dreaming, I hear the music of a little bell and know that I am being wafted across fifty years of memory, over twelve thousand miles of sea and land, to the Temple of the Azure Clouds, where the sacristan is as of old calling the good monks to morning prayer. I had my teacher with me and was hard at work. There is a pretty fable which tells how Confucius and his disciples in surroundings not more romantic than these used to work on into the night, studying by the light of the fire-flies. Here, too, the pretty creatures swarm, tiny wandering electric lights, winging their bright way among the shrubs and trees of the sacred gardens; but we, more prosaic than the sages, are content to work by day, letting our evenings treasure idleness. What more fascinating study can there be than that of a strange language opening out a whole vista of new thoughts and ideas? But if that language be of the East, the expression of all the poetic imagery, of the original conceptions, of the unexpected twists and turns of the volutes of the Oriental brain, then the charm is complete. There is, moreover, as an incentive the difficulty: at each step gained the sense of achievement, of victory. In the absence of books the task is well-nigh hopeless.