"'Why,' said he, 'should you object to die? I shall fattan you for three months. I shall discipline myself for ten days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass, and place you bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you? "'Yet perhaps after all,' he continued, speaking from the pigs' point of view, 'it is better to live on bran and escape the shambles... "'No,' said he; speaking from his own point of view again. 'To enjoy honor when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or in the haeadsman's basket.' "So he rejected the pigs' point of view and clung to his own. In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs?" And here, the still more famous tale of the Sacred Tortoise:-- "Chwantse was fishing in the river P'u when the Prince of Ch'u sent two high officials to ask him to take charge of the administration. "Chwangtse went on fishing, and without turning his head said: 'I have heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years. And that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple. Now if this tortoise had its choice, which would it prefer: to be dead, and have its remains venerated; or to be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud?' "'Sir,' replied the two officials, 'it would rather be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud.' "'Begone!' cried Chwangtse. 'I too will wag my tail in the mud!'" Well; so much for _Butterfly;_ now for _Chwang_--and to introduce you to some of his real thought and teaching. You will not have shot so wide of the mark as to see in his story of the skull traces of pessimism: Chwantse had none of it; he was a very happy fellow; like the policeman in the poem, ".....a merry genial wag Who loved a mad conceit."