“Brother, you did well. You acted as a filial child should. I have a
wife and two sons in Szechuen. If my sons heard of the manner of my
death they would do the same to you and more also. But they will never
know. I think, perhaps, it is better they should not, for, indeed, you
are a marvellous gardener. Send my body to Szechuen and now—now—I
would—sleep——”
So Yeh the magistrate slept, To Tao religiously carried out his dead
master’s last wishes, and then returned to his gardens.
His fame as a producer of dwarf trees spreads daily further and further
afield, which, coupled with his increasing prosperity, point to rewards
received for a virtuous life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOO, THE DAUGHTER OF TAK WO
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOO, THE DAUGHTER OF TAK WO
ON YICK’S residence was quite charmingly situated in a narrow gorge down
which a small torrent ran, winter and summer alike. This small stream
was turned to every use that the ingenious and painstaking Chinaman so
admirably accomplishes invariably where running water is present. This
particular hill stream, although not more than two miles in extent, from
its source where it bubbled as a spring from the rocks some fifteen
hundred feet above sea-level to where it joined the sea across the sandy
beach of the small village of Tai Kok, had been trained and coaxed to
turn three mill-wheels, flood acres of paddy in irregular curved
mud-walled fields, varying in size and shape from a table-cloth to a
barrack square, from a crescent to a hexagon, after which it afforded
nutriment and recreation for numerous ducks, water for the pine-apple
fields on the hillsides and also for cooking purposes, and possibly for
washing, to the peaceable inhabitants of Tai Kok. This little nameless
stream through countless ages unostentatiously has continued to benefit
hundreds of our oblique-eyed fellow-men in Southern China.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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