_Li-Chi (archly)._ The "Heathen Chinee," as the wanton Western scribe insolently calls him, is indeed "peculiar," as perchance even Count EUGENE STANISLOW KOSTKA DE MITKIEWICZ and Mr. JAY-GOULD, HOOD, MACKAY the multi-millionnaire, and BARKER Brothers the Bankers, New York Syndicates and Philadelphian Silver Rings, may yet discover as clearly and completely as did _Bill Nye_ and _Truthful James_ of the ribald ballad. _Chang (admiringly)._ Verily even the orbicular contractility of dexter-optical semi-closure becometh those almond eyes, oh! flesh-enshrined opium-ecstasy of my most transcendental inwardness. _Li-Chi (smartly)._ I should think it did, indeed! A wink is as good as a nod to a blind lover. "Melican Man" is very 'cute and enterprising; but whether he'll find it quite so easy as he fancies to "run" the Celestial Kingdom, or "exploit" the Flowery Land, remains as the never-sufficiently-to-be-commended-and-left-carefully-unread KUNG-FOO-TZE would say, "to be duskily adumbrated in the spirit-speculum of the yet To-be." _Chang._ Quite so. Still, O million-berried mulberry-tree of my mean and inconsiderable soul-garden, to have our own secular love-legend and its many-centuried Scene thus sordidly transmogrified, cannot, O, shining one of my spirit's crepuscular gloom. O, beneficent betel-nut of my supersensual Palate"-- _Li-Chi._ Well, CHANG, after all, novelty hath its charm--after a cycle or two, you know. Marquis TSENG talks about "the awakening of China." As if there was ever a Celestial who, for all his childlikeness and blandness, was not very wide-awake indeed! Why, LI-CHI, if ever _we_ had our time over again, _do_ you think that transmutation into a pair of turtle-doves,--bird-beatitudes, my CHANG, are _so_ limited!--would form the acme of our mutual aspirations? _Chang._ Well, per--haps not, LI-CHI. Better fifty years of Europe Than a Cycle of Cathay,-- --as turtle-doves, you know. Still, that chuckling and cavorting American fowl, that two-headed and vulturine Russo-Polish Eagle, do not quite fit into the Mongolian Arcadia of the Willow-pattern plate; now do they? We have fallen, lily of my life, upon sordid, and subversive, and sceptical times, when millions of taels move our Mandarins to Modernism, when Silver Rings and Syndicates, can set up a Party of Progress in the Realm of the Immutable, and when doubts have been thrown by shallow scribes upon the existence of the Great Wall of China itself! _Li-Chi (shuddering)._ Dreadful, dear! Let's turn back into turtle-doves at once, and coo ourselves into truly Celestial obliviousness of this colossal Yankee _coup_, which threatens--perchance prematurely--to fix for all time _this_ preposterously Western and barbaric picture as the Willow Pattern of the Future! [_They do so._ * * * * * [Illustration: SAGACITY.]