_Immortal._--“It is of the primeval species of _sauroid_ fish. It has been frozen during cycles of time. This region was once warmer. Nature’s changeful developments are a curious mystery to man, but it ever unfolds in increasing knowledge.” They wheel southward--anon traverse Chinese Tartary--sweep over the Chinese wall, and alight in Pekin. They poise themselves on a lofty pagoda. _Mortal._--“These Chinese are a mysterious people. I am curious about them. That wall was a great enterprise in its day, and a singular one.” _Immortal._--“They are a swarm from an ancient human hive, and have long been numerous and astute. They have been, and are superior to the average of mankind, but inferior to the more illumined and most cultivated. Their numbers and limited geographic sphere have made them feel want; yet their inventions, although multiplied, have been petty, fanciful, crude and clumsy contrivances to meet emergency, in comparison with the grander discoveries and more studied and beautiful designs of other and higher civilizations. _Necessity_ has stimulated their cunning, but precludes their reflection; it has pinched their faculties, as the ‘iron shoe’ has their feet. Their mental contraction has been rendered more compressive by their moral and spiritual defects. They have had no conception of a God, _per se_. It is the conception which most expands man!” _Mortal._--“But this pagoda (truly it is a grotesque structure!) is a temple devoted to some worship.” _Immortal._--“It is a fane of the merest idolatry, and dedicated to idols, ‘of the earth, earthly,’ not to any images which are even typical of divine _essences_. But of this, anon.” _Mortal._--“The Chinese have, however, a demi-god--their ‘Celestial Emperor.’” _Immortal._--“Yes, he is their immediate authority, temporal and spiritual. Yet he and his mandarins, alike with his subjects, are constrained, by the dominancy of twenty-four centuries of veneration for the great Chinese philosopher and moralist, Koong-Foo-tse, (latinized, Confucius,) to worship in the temples dedicated to that extraordinary statesman and expounder. This pagoda is one of these temples, which have been reared in all chief cities and towns. His ‘nine books’ constitute the creed and code--the bible--of the ‘Celestial Empire,’ and you will deem it a singular fact that they contain no mention of a Creator--no allusion to God.” _Mortal._--“It is indeed strange for so intelligent a people. All other peoples have some kind of a belief and worship of a Supreme Being. Hark! I hear sounds from below--I hear chants!” _Immortal._--“Yes, they are from the Emperor and his court, performing idol-service, offering fruits, wines, flowers and fancy articles, and now singing chants. We will witness their return to the palace, and then visit them.”