Winding through narrow alleys bordered by great sepia-colored walls, we reach the richer quarter. If these closed doors should open to us, they would show vestibules flagged with stone, a reception hall with its large bed-table, a little peach-tree flowering in a pot, and smoky passages whose rafters are hung with hams and bundles. Hidden behind this wall, in a little court we find a monster of a wisteria plant. Its hundred creepers interlace, interweave, tie themselves in knots, and twine into a kind of manifold, tortuous cable, which, thrusting out its woody, serpentine length on all sides, spreads over the trellis, hiding its trench in a thick sky of mauve clusters. Let us traverse the ruins of this long suburb where naked men are weaving silk in the débris. We shall gain a deserted space which occupies the south side of the enclosure. Here, they say, was formerly the imperial residence; and in fact the triple grating and quadruple framework of the consecutive doors bar, with their granite outlines, the wide flagged road on which we walk. The enclosure contains nothing but rank herbage; and,--at the place where the “Four Ways” meet, which diverge toward the four cardinal points under triumphal arches,--with an inscription like a map displayed to the whole Kingdom, the imperial stele, defaced by the fissures in its marble, slants on the decapitated tortoise which is its base. The Chinese show everywhere representations of that inherent emptiness whose necessity they emphasize. “Let us honor,” says the _Tao teh King_, “Vacuity, which gives to the wheel its utility and to the lute its harmony!” These ruins and these fallow tracts which are found in the same enclosure close to the densest multitudes, these sterile mountains shouldering the most meticulous culture, and the wide expanse of the cemeteries, do not impress the mind with a false idea; for, in the density and mass of this coherent people, administration and justice, religion and monarchy, disclose by contrasts no less strange the same yawning vacancy of vain phantoms and ruins. China is not, like Europe, elaborated into compartments. No boundaries, no special statutes, oppose any resistance throughout her immense area to the spread of her surging humanity. That is why, powerless as is the sea to foresee its agitations, this nation which can only be saved from destruction by its plasticity, shows everywhere, like Nature itself, an antique and provisory aspect,--unstable, full of hazards, possibilities, and deficiencies. The present always contains the influences of the past and the future. Man has not made an absolute conquest of the soil, a final and methodical arrangement. The multitude still graze upon grass.