4.  One who, having incurred the displeasure of the sublime Emperor, has been decapitated in consequence.

5.  An ordinary person of no striking or distinguished appearance.  One who can be safely introduced in all places and circumstances without great fear of detection.

After many months spent in constant practice and in taking measurements, this unenviable person attained a very high degree of proficiency, and could draw any of the five characters without hesitation.  With renewed hope, therefore, he again approached those who sit in easy-chairs, and concealing his identity (for they are stiff at bending, and when once a picture-maker is classed as “of no good” he remains so to the end, in spite of change), he succeeded in getting entrusted with a story by the elegant and refined Kyen Tal.  This writer, as he remembered with distrust, confines his distinguished efforts entirely to the doings of sailors and of those connected with the sea, and this tale, indeed, he found upon reading to be the narrative of how a Hang-Chow junk and its crew, consisting mostly of aged persons, were beguiled out of their course by an exceedingly ill-disposed dragon, and wrecked upon an island of naked barbarians.  It was, therefore, with a somewhat heavy stomach that this person set himself the task of arranging his five characters as so to illustrate the words of the story.

The sayings of the ancient philosopher Tai Loo are indeed very subtle, and the truth of his remark, “After being disturbed in one’s dignity by a mandarin’s foot it is no unusual occurrence to fall flat on the face in crossing a muddy street,” was now apparent.  Great as was the disadvantage owing to the nature of the five characters, this became as nothing when it presently appeared that the avaricious and clay-souled Tieng Lin, taking advantage of the blindness of this person’s enthusiasm, had taught him the figures so that they all gazed in the same direction.  In consequence of this it would have been impossible that two should be placed as in the act of conversing together had not the noble Kyen Tal been inspired to write that “his companions turned from him in horror.”  This incident the ingenious person who is recording these facts made the subject of three separate drawings, and having in one or two other places effected skilful changes in the writing, so similar in style to the strokes of the illustrious Kyen Tal as to be undetectable, he found little difficulty in making use of all his characters.  The risks of the future, however, were too great to be run with impunity; therefore it was arranged, by means of money—­for this person was fast becoming acquainted with the ways of Peking—­that an emissary from one who sat in an easy-chair should call upon him for a conference, the narrative of which appeared in this form in the Peking Printed Leaves of Thrice-distilled Truth: