And so one after another come and take their stand before the idol. Some have a free-and-easy air about them, whilst others are intense and impassioned. Some accept at once the answer of the goddess as final, whilst others again continue to fling up the two coarse pieces of bamboo until they give the reply that they wish to have. One young lad about eighteen attracts my attention. For fully a minute, with calm and untroubled face, his lips keep moving and his gaze is concentrated on Kwan-Yin. I ask him when he is finished what he has been asking of her. "I have been out of employment for some time," he replies, "and I have been round to several temples and entreated the gods there to find me a place; but they have done nothing for me, so I thought I would come here and see if I should be more successful with the idol of this temple." As the evening sun began to set behind the mass of clouds that seemed to gather on the Western mountains to catch the last glimpse of him before he disappeared, we began to descend the hill. Numbers of those that I had seen standing with devout faces and uplifted hands before the idol were fellow-travellers. Others, again, who had ascended the hill for an outing, and whom I had watched sitting in the grottoes, eating peanuts, and deftly cracking dried melon seeds, and sipping tea, moved down at the same time. The wooden gods were left behind in the gathering gloom of their shrines, and the only figures they saw were the opium-visaged priests that flitted about like ghosts. The people at any rate had had a pleasant day, and a breath of pure air, and a vision of nature in her most beautiful aspect, but nothing more. "What have you gained to-day in your appeal to the goddess?" I asked of a man that I had seen very devout in his prayers. He looked at me with a quick and searching glance. "You ask me what answer I have got to my petition to the goddess?" he said. "Yes," I replied, "that is what I want to know from you." "Well, you have asked me more than I can tell you. The whole question of the idols is a profoundly mysterious one that no one can fathom. Whether they do or can help people is something I cannot tell. I worship them because my fathers did so before me, and if they were satisfied, so must I be. The whole thing is a mystery," and he passed on with the look of a man who was puzzled with a problem that he could not solve, and that look is a permanent one on the face of the nation to-day. CHAPTER V SERVANTS General character of servants--The duties and perquisites of the cook--Taking account with cook--His oblique ideas of morality--The boy, his duties, etc.--The way that small things mysteriously disappear in a house--Percentages--The servant question.