"The Mandarin had an only daughter, named LI-CHI, who fell in love with CHANG, a young man who lived in the island-home represented at the top of the pattern, and who had been her father's secretary. The father overheard them one day making vows of love under the orange-tree, and sternly forbade the unequal match; but the lovers contrived to elope, lay concealed for awhile in the gardener's cottage, and thence made their escape in a boat to the island-home of the young lover. The enraged Mandarin pursued them with a whip, and would have beaten them to death, had not the gods rewarded their fidelity by changing them both into turtle-doves. The picture is called the Willow-Pattern, not only because it is a tale of disastrous love, but because the elopement occurred 'when the willow begins to shed its leaves.'"--_Legend of the Willow-Pattern._ SCENE--_that of the tradition. Season, willow-fall. Hour, sundown._ _Li-Chi_ (_sings_)-- The poor soul sat sighing by a rum-looking tree, Sing, once a green willow; But now all its leaves smell of base £ _s._ _d._; Sing willow, willow, willow! The old stream runs by her, not with the old tones, Sing willow, willow, willow! But, churned by coarse paddles, it plashes and groans; Sing willow, willow, willow! _Chang._ Ah, yellow and irradiant sunflower of my soul's secret shrine, sing not thus dolefully, I entreat thee. What avails the permission to escape awhile our old ornithological metamorphosis, and revisit once again the glimpses of the Mandarin's country seat, the pavilion, the peach and the orange-tree, the elegant wooden fence, the bridge, the boat, and, above all, the willow, only to sing songs whose spirit-cleaving cadences sting thy CHANG more than ever did the angry Mandarin's whip-lash? _Li-Chi (mournfully)._ What, indeed? But O, sublimated saffron-bag of my spirit's idolatry, who can help weeping at sight of _this_? _Chang (reading)._ "National and International Amalgamated Bank!" O, mighty but much-too-free-with-the-whip-hand-of-parental-authority Mandarin of the Middle Kingdom, what would you have thought of this transformation? _Li-Chi._ Papa was impetuous. Our--our elopement angered him. But Telegraph-poles, Telephone Exchanges, River Steamers, Banks and Blazing Posters!!--Alas!!! _Chang (hotly)._ By the isolated button of Celestial supereminence, it is too bad! What _can_ LI HUNG CHANG, that dragon-claw of the throne, that amber-souled prop of imperial perpendicularity be about, I wonder? _Li-Chi (meditatively)._ We--e--ell,--perhaps he knows, after all. _Chang._ What meaneth the tintinnabulant tea-blossom of my trivial and ephemeral personality?