The Mirror of Kong Ho | Page 7

spot, either by the services of the charitably-disposed
passer-by, or by the intervention of the beneficent deities.
With a multiplicity of greetings and many abject expressions of a
conscious inferiority, and attested by an unvarying thumb-mark.
KONG HO. (Effete branch of a pure and magnanimous trunk.)

To Kong Ah-Paik, reclining beneath the sign of the Lead Tortoise, in a
northerly direction beyond the Lotus Beds outside the city of
Yuen-ping. The Middle Flowery Kingdom.

LETTER II
Concerning the ill-destined manner of existence of the hound Hercules.
The thoughtlessly-expressed desire of the entrancing maiden and its
effect upon a person of susceptible refinement. The opportune (as it
may yet be described) visit of one Herbert. The behaviour of those
around. Reflections.
VENERATED SIRE (whose large right hand is continuously floating
in spirit over the image of this person's dutiful submission),--
Doubtless to your all-consuming prescience, it will at once become
plain that I have abandoned the place of residence from which I
directed my former badly-written and offensively-constructed letter, the
house of the sympathetic and resourceful Maidens Blank, where in

return for an utterly inadequate sum of money, produced at stated
intervals, this very much inferior person was allowed to partake of a
delicately-balanced and somewhat unvarying fare in the company of
the engaging of both sexes, and afterwards to associate on terms of
honourable equality with them in the chief apartment. The reason and
manner of this one's departure are in no degree formidable to his
refined manner of conducting any enterprise, but arose partly from an
insufficient grasp of the more elaborate outlines of a confessedly
involved language, and still more from a too excessive impetuousness
in carrying out what at the time he believed to be the ambition of one
who had come to exercise a melodious influence over his most internal
emotions. Well remarked the Sage, "A piece of gold may be tried
between the teeth; a written promise to pay may be disposed of at a
sacrifice to one more credulous; but what shall be said of the wind, the
Hoang Ho, and the way of a woman?"
To contrive a pitfall for this short-sighted person's immature feet,
certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more
autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an
excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the
possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the
habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around
by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its
outer surface, and when the weather was more than usually cold, by
stretching its graceful and refined body before the fire in such a way as
to ensure that no one should suffer from a too acute exposure to the
heat. From these causes, and because it was by nature a hound which
even on the darkest night could be detected at a more than reasonable
distance away, while at all times it did not hesitate to shake itself freely
into the various prepared viands, this person (and doubtless others also)
regarded it with an emotion very unfavourable towards its prolonged
existence; but observing from the first that those who permitted
themselves to be deposited upon, and their hands and even their faces
to be hound-tongue-defiled with the most externally cheerful spirit of
word suppression, invariably received the most desirable of the allotted
portions of food, he judged it prudent and conducive to a settled
digestion to greet it with favourable terms and actions, and to refer

frequently to its well-displayed proportions, and to the agile dexterity
which it certainly maintained in breathing into the contents of every
dish. Thus the matter may be regarded as being positioned for a space
of time.
One evening I returned at the appointed gong-stroke of dinner, and was
beginning, according to my custom, to greet the hound with ingratiating
politeness, when the one of chief authority held up a reproving hand, at
the same time exclaiming:
"No, Mr. Kong, you must not encourage Hercules with your amiable
condescension, for just now he is in very bad odour with us all."
"Undoubtedly," replied this person, somewhat puzzled, nevertheless,
that the imperfection should thus be referred to openly by one who
hitherto had not hesitated to caress the hound with most intimate details,
"undoubtedly the surrounding has a highly concentrated acuteness
to-night, but the ever-present characteristic of the hound Hercules is by
no means new, for whenever he is in the room--"
At this point it is necessary to explain that the ceremonial etiquette of
these barbarian outcasts is both conflicting and involved. Upon most of
the ordinary occasions of life to obtrude oneself within the conversation
of another is a thing not to be done, yet repeatedly when this
unpretentious