At nineteen, according to the custom, he married; and soon afterwards accepted minor official appointments:  Keeper of the Granaries, then Superintendent of the Public Parks in his native district.  He made a name for himself by the scrupulous discharge of his duties, that came even to the ears of the Marquis; who, when his son was born, sent the young father a complimentary present of a carp.—­It would have been two or three years before the beginning of the last quarter of the century when he felt the time calling to him, and voices out of the Eternal; and threw up his superintendentship to open a school.

Not an ordinary school by any means.  The Pupils were not children, but young men of promise and an inquiring mind; and what he had to teach them was not the ordinary curriculum, but right living, the right ordering of social life, and the right government of states.  They were to pay; but to pay according to their means and wishes; and he demanded intelligence from them; —­no swelling of the fees would serve instead.—­“I do not open the truth,” said he, “to one not eager after knowledge; nor do I teach those unanxious to explain themselves.  When I have presented one corner of a subject, and the student cannot learn from it the other three for himself, I do not repeat the lesson.”  He lectured to them, we read, mainly on history and poetry, deducing his lessons in life from these.

His school was a great success.  In five years he had acquired some two thousand pupils:  seventy or eighty of them, as he said, “men of extraordinary ability.”  It was that the Doors of the Lodge had opened, and its force was flowing through him in Lu, as it was through the Old Philosopher in Honanfu.—­By this time he had added archery to his own studies, and (like William Q. Judge) become proficient.  Also he had taken a special course in music theory under a very famous teacher.  “At thirty he stood firm.”

Two of his disciples were members of the royal family; and Marquis Chao regarded him with favor, as the foremost educationist in the state.  He had an ambition to visit the capital (of China); where, as no where else, ritual might be studied; where, too, was Laotse, with whom he longed to confer.  Marquis Chao, hearing of this, provided him with the means; and he went up with a band of his pupils.  There at Loyang, which is Honanfu, we see him wandering rapt through palaces and temples, examining the sacrificial vessels, marveling at the ancient art of Shang and Chow.  But for a few vases, it is all lost.

He did interview Laotse; we cannot say whether only once or more often.  Nor, I think, do we know what passed; the accounts we get are from the pen of honest Ben Trovato; Vero, the modest, had but little hand in them.  We shall come to them later.