Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment to note a peculiarity.  In China, from time immemorial, they have possessed a certain refinement of industry and art.  It is the art of moulding a living man.  They take a child, two or three years old, put him in a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque, which is made without top or bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet.  During the day the vase is set upright, and at night is laid down to allow the child to sleep.  Thus the child thickens without growing taller, filling up with his compressed flesh and distorted bones the reliefs in the vase.  This development in a bottle continues many years.  After a certain time it becomes irreparable.  When they consider that this is accomplished, and the monster made, they break the vase.  The child comes out—­and, behold, there is a man in the shape of a mug!

This is convenient:  by ordering your dwarf betimes you are able to have it of any shape you wish.

V.

James II. tolerated the Comprachicos for the good reason that he made use of them; at least it happened that he did so more than once.  We do not always disdain to use what we despise.  This low trade, an excellent expedient sometimes for the higher one which is called state policy, was willingly left in a miserable state, but was not persecuted.  There was no surveillance, but a certain amount of attention.  Thus much might be useful—­the law closed one eye, the king opened the other.

Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his complicity.  These are audacities of monarchical terrorism.  The disfigured one was marked with the fleur-de-lis; they took from him the mark of God; they put on him the mark of the king.  Jacob Astley, knight and baronet, lord of Melton Constable, in the county of Norfolk, had in his family a child who had been sold, and upon whose forehead the dealer had imprinted a fleur-de-lis with a hot iron.  In certain cases in which it was held desirable to register for some reason the royal origin of the new position made for the child, they used such means.  England has always done us the honour to utilize, for her personal service, the fleur-de-lis.

The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India.  They lived among themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat of the merry-andrew.  They encamped here and there, but they were grave and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of theft.  The people for a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors of Spain and the Moors of China.  The Moors of Spain were coiners, the Moors of China were thieves.  There was nothing of the sort about the Comprachicos; they were honest folk.  Whatever you may think of them, they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous.  They pushed open a door, entered, bargained for a child, paid, and departed.  All was done with propriety.