"To the teaching of the lady Candida Hiu am I indebted for having forsworn the stupid worship of Fo and the selfish philosophy of Confucius," replied the colao; adding, "But ask no more, O youth, for to speak of Christ out of the pale of that lady's influence is to earn disgrace, if not death." So saying the ex-minister retired, leaving Nicholas to his own thoughts. CHAPTER XVIII. THE IMPERIAL GARDENS. The next morning Nicholas proceeded on his mission, and, as the courts of the palace were crowded with soldiers and mandarins of various ranks, in waiting to receive the great lords of state, who were that day to have audience with the Emperor, he managed to pass through the crowd without being once challenged. With but little difficulty, he found the door mentioned by Ki, and passing through by means of the key, he entered a narrow lane between two walls. Near the inner wall stood the mulberry-tree, up which he clambered quickly, for he knew not who might enter the passage. When, by means of one of the branches, he had gained the top of the wall, his eyes drank in a new pleasure. There, before, beneath were the magnificent gardens of the inner palace, and so charmed were his senses that for a minute it seemed as if the penalty of death were but a small price for the vision. The enclosed grounds were of many miles extent, and so varied in their arrangement, that they might have served for a model of the empire itself. There was something of most things natural and artificial in China: towering mountains cut into terraces and planted with trees of rarity and beauty; fertile valleys laid out in orange groves and intermingled with murmuring rivulets; then bridges of tinted marble, wrought to resemble flying dragons, whose eyes and scales were fashioned from colored metals, flew across small lakes of clear, transparent water, in which, as a paradise of their own, gamboled shoals of gold and silver fish, which at that time had not been brought to Europe; then orchards of fruit trees, making the morning air redolent with the mingled scents of rare specimens of pears, apples, peaches, citrons, apricots, muscadine grapes, pomegranates, and oranges. The sides of the main canal, from which the dripping rivulets sprang, were embossed with cypress and mulberry-trees, whose feet seemed planted in a sprinkled fringe of water melons. On this canal, with its awning of yellow silk and golden fringe, floated the gilded japanned pleasure barge of the ladies. For a time the boy's head swam with a new sensation. Such, thought he, must have been the garden of that Emperor whose jealousy of the powers of the cruel winter over his summer beauties caused him to waste the revenue of a kingdom and the industry of a whole people in creating a garden of artificial flowers, forgetting that the annual decay was alone the cause of the ever-living freshness and perfume of nature.