He was met by a lady of charming appearance, who came out of an inner room, and said:  “Who is this that ventures to intrude upon a widow’s household?” The situation was embarrassing, but the lady proved to be most affable, welcomed them all very heartily, told them how she became a widow and had been left in possession of riches in abundance, and that she had three daughters, Truth, Love, and Pity by name.  She then proceeded to make a proposal of marriage, not only on behalf of herself, but of her three daughters as well.  They were four men, and here were four women; she had mountain lands for fruit-trees, dry lands for grain, flooded fields for rice—­more than five thousand acres of each; horses, oxen, sheep, pigs innumerable; sixty or seventy farmsteads; granaries choked with grain; storehouses full of silks and satins; gold and silver enough to last several lifetimes however extravagantly they lived.  Why should the four travellers not finish their journey there, and be happy ever afterward?  The temptation was great, especially as the three daughters were ladies of surpassing beauty as well as adepts at needlework and embroidery, well read, and able to sing sweetly.

But Hsuean Chuang sat as if listening to frogs after rain, unmoved except by anger that she should attempt to divert him from his heavenly purpose, and in the end the lady retired in a rage, slamming the door behind her.

The covetous Pa-chieh, however, expressed himself in favour of accepting the widow’s terms.  Finding it impossible to do so openly, he stole round to the back and secured a private interview.  His personal appearance was against him, but the widow was not altogether uncompliant.  She not only entertained the travellers, but agreed to Pa-chieh retiring within the household in the character of a son-in-law, the other three remaining as guests in the guest-rooms.

Blind Man’s Buff

But a new problem now arose.  If Pa-chieh were wedded to one of the three daughters, the others would feel aggrieved.  So the widow proposed to blindfold him with a handkerchief, and marry him to whichever he succeeded in catching.  But, with the bandage tied over his eyes, Pa-chieh only found himself groping in darkness.  “The tinkling sound of female trinkets was all around him, the odour of musk was in his nostrils; like fairy forms they fluttered about him, but he could no more grasp one than he could a shadow.  One way and another he ran till he was too giddy to stand, and could only stumble helplessly about.”

The prospective mother-in-law then unloosed the bandage, and informed Pa-chieh that it was not her daughters’ ‘slipperiness,’ as he had called it, which prevented their capture, but the extreme modesty of each in being generous enough to forgo her claims in favour of one of her sisters.  Pa-chieh thereupon became very importunate, urging his suit for any one of the daughters or for the mother herself or for all