a day’s real enjoyment, with perchance a creditable convert to be won at the end of it.  Behold them sitting down to the fray, in the shadows among the books:  the young Cho Kung, affable (I like the word well), voluble and earnest; the old Librarian, mild, with little to say but buts and ifs, and courteous even beyond the wont in that “last refuge of good manners,” China.  All day long they sat; and affable Cho, like Sir Macklin in the poem,

     “Argued high and argued low,
     And likewise argued round about him”;

—­until by fall of dusk the Librarian was fairly beaten.  So cogent were Cho’s arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence, so entirely convincing his facts adduced—­his modern instances, as you may say—­that there really was nothing for the old man to answer.  Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it was absurd to think they could.  The Librarian had not a leg to stand on; that was flat.  Accordingly he rose to his feet—­and bowed.—­“Sir,” said he, with all prescribed honorifics, “undoubtedly you are victorious.  The contemptible present speaker sees the error of his miserable ways.  He is convinced.  It remains for him only to add”—­and here something occurred to make Cho rub his eyes—­“that he is himself a supernatural being.”—­And with that his form and limbs distend, grow misty—­and he vanishes in a cloud up through the ceiling.—­You see, those old librarians in China had a way of doing things which was all their own.

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* The story is told in Dr. H. H. Giles’ Dictionary of Chinese
Biography.
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So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day.  Arguments?—­ You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing, where Tao is concerned.  The Tiger was abroad, straining all those lithe tendons,—­a tense fearful symmetry of destruction burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya:  grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for power.—­“It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to strive.”  Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey-turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things a chance to right themselves.  There is nothing flashy or to make a show about in Tao; it vies with no one.  Let go; let be; find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self-emptiness.  Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right without aid of governing, without politics and voting and canvassing and such.—­Here and Now and What comes by were his prescriptions.  He was an advocate of the Small State.  Aristotle would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size