The girl begs and entreats the mother to loosen the bandages a little so that the agonizing pain may be diminished, and life may become somewhat more tolerable. The only reply is a tighter wrench upon them, and a strain, that were not nature so elastic, would send the poor thing mad. The morrow comes and the rebandaging takes place. For an instant, as the feet are relieved of the old bandages, and they are shown inflamed and discoloured, a momentary relief is felt by the poor girl who has slept in fitful dozes during the past night, but the moment they are rebound by the new ones, a cry of horror proceeds from her as though a raw sore had been touched, and the house resounds with her screams, whilst the mother, apparently untouched by the agony of her daughter, proceeds with her revolting task, as though she had no heart and no feeling left in her heathen soul. This terrible martyrdom goes on with scarcely any alleviation for three or four years, the poor victim to fashion suffering acutely all the time. There are moments often repeated when the poor child actually quivers all over from excruciating pain, and it would seem as though flesh and blood could no longer endure the frightful strain put upon her, but must dissolve in tears and groans and unutterable agony. Foot-binding is one of the most senseless and cruel customs it is possible to imagine. Its origin is dimly hidden in the maze and mist of the past, and no one can say positively how it originated. Tradition holds that it arose in the palace of an Emperor, who had a most beautiful concubine, but whose feet were deformed. To hide their defect they were so manipulated that their glaring deformity was concealed, and the ladies of the court in order to gain her favour bandaged their own in such a manner as to be an exact imitation of those of the royal favourite. From that time, it is said, the insane and hideous custom began to spread from the court into the capital, and from there it began to be copied by the women of the Empire. The popular legend makes this woman to be T'a Ki, the famous concubine of Show Sin, the last ruler of the famous Chow Dynasty (B.C. 1146). She is said to have been the most beautiful woman that ever lived, but to have been inhuman and vicious beyond anything that human language can express. She was the cause of the fall of the dynasty, a dynasty in which was enshrined the great names of Confucius, Mencius, Tau-tze the founder of Tauism, and Wu Wang. To account for the fatal influence of this famous beauty, it is declared that she was a fox fairy, who had assumed the form of a woman in order to be able to hurry on the ruin of China. In the transformation everything was changed but her feet, and in order to disguise these she had to resort to the most ingenious methods. To curry favour with her the ladies-in-waiting in the palace bound theirs to imitate the appearance of hers, and so the custom of foot-binding was commenced that has lasted all these ages.