Let be; let three little centuries pass; let the funeral pyre but be kindled, and quite burn itself out; and let the ashes grow cold—­

And behold you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and dazzling, rising up from them!  Behold you now this same Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over all the Eastern World. . . .

But this is to anticipate:  to take you on to the second century B. C.; whereas I want you now in the sixth.—­I said that you should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither, than anywhere else in Chu Hia.  That was particularly true in the latter part of that sixth century:  because there was a man by the name of Li Urh, chief librarian there, from whom, if you cared to, you might hear better things than were to be found in the books in his charge.  His fame, it appears, has gone abroad through the world; although his chief aim seems to be to keep in the shadows and not be talked about.  Scholars resort to him from far and near; one of them, the greatest of all, who came to him in the year 517 and was (if we are to believe accounts) treated without too much mercy, came out awestruck, and said:  “Today I have seen the Dragon.”—­What! that little old man with the bald head and straggly lank Chirese beard?—­Like enough, like enough! —­they are not all, as you look at them with these physical eyes, to be seen winged and wandering the heavens. . . .

But wandering the heavens, this one, yes!  He has the blue ether about him, even there in the Library among the books.—­He has a way of putting things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to solve all the problems,—­to take you out of the dust and clatter of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all problems are solved, or non-existent.  Chu Hia is all a fuss and turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old Philosopher—­as he has come to be called—­has anchorage right outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the peaks of heaven.  A kind of school forms itself around him; his wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men of the capital from commonplace courses.  Though he has been accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing; living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,—­as things at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and wrappings for its cocoon;—­whereas he would have had the whole cocoon stripped away, and the butterfly beautifully airing its wings.  Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us.  They have to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and much else, are included in Chinese in the one word Tao.