“There is iced seaweed jelly, for one thing,” began the Gentle Boy, “and a ragout of water lilies, pork and chicken dumplings with bamboo shoots, bird’s-nest soup and boiled almonds, ducks’ eggs one hundred years old, garnished with strips of sucking pig and heavenly fish fried in paradise oil, white balls of rice flour stuffed with sweetmeats, honey and rose-leaves, candied frogs and salted crabs, sugared seaweed and pickled stars.”

He paused.

“Now, tell me,” said the Wild Man, “which of all things would you like best to eat?”

The Gentle Boy’s eye wandered musingly over the Wild Man’s gigantic proportions, his hungry mouth, his fanglike teeth. He flipped a ladybird insect off his silken cuff and smiled at the Wild Man as he did so.

“Best of all, honorable sir,” he slowly said, “I would like to eat you.”

The Wild Man sat transfixed, staring at the Gentle Boy, his mouth half open, the hair standing up on his head. And to this day he sits there, on the high road to Cheang Che, a piece of petrified stone.

THE GARMENTS OF THE FAIRIES

“Why do we never see the fairies?” asked Mermei.

“Because,” replied her mother, “the fairies do not wish to be seen.”

“But why, honorable mother, do they not wish to be seen?”

“Would my jade jewel wish to show herself to strangers if she wore no tunic or shoes or rosettes?”

Mermei glanced down at her blue silk tunic embroidered in white and gold, at her scarlet shoes beaded at the tips so as to resemble the heads of kittens; and looking over to a mirror hung on the side of the wall where the sun shone, noted the purple rosettes in her hair and the bright butterfly’s wing.

“Oh, no! honorable mother,” said she, shaking her head with quite a shocked air.

“Then, when you hear the reason why the fairies do not appear to you except in your dreams, you will know that they are doing just as you would do were you in a fairy’s shoes.”

“A story! A story!” cried Mermei, clapping her hands and waving her fan, and Choy and Fei and Wei and Sui, who were playing battledore and shuttlecock on the green, ran into the house and grouped themselves around Mermei and the mother. They all loved stories.

“Many, many years ago,” began the mother of Mermei, “when the sun was a warm-hearted but mischievous boy, playing all kinds of pranks with fruits and flowers and growing things, and his sister, the moon, was too young to be sad and serious, the fairies met together by night. The sun, of course, was not present, and the moon had withdrawn behind a cloud. Stars alone shone in the quiet sky. By their light the fairies looked upon each other, and found themselves so fair and radiant in their robes of varied hues, all wonderfully fashioned, fringed and laced, some bright and brilliant, others, delicate and gauzy, but each and all a perfect dream of loveliness, that they danced for very joy in themselves and the garments in which they were arrayed.