One day Busanshi received a visit from the great Teki-Shin-Ketsu, a famous teacher of moral doctrine; and the maid did not respond to her master’s call.  Busanshi went himself to seek her, being desirous that Teki-Shin-Ketsu should see her and admire her; but she was nowhere to be found.  After having searched the whole house in vain, Busanshi was returning to the guest-room when he suddenly caught sight of the maid, gliding soundlessly before him along a corridor.  He called to her, and hurried after her.  Then she turned half-round, and flattened herself against the wall like a spider; and as he reached her she sank backwards into the wall, so that there remained of her nothing visible but a colored shadow,—­level like a picture painted on the plaster.  But the shadow moved its lips and eyes, and spoke to him in a whisper, saying:—­

“Pardon me that I did not obey your august call!...  I am not a mankind-person;—­I am only the Soul of a Peony.  Because you loved peonies so much, I was able to take human shape, and to serve you.  But now this Teki-Shin-Ketsu has come,—­and he is a person of dreadful propriety,—­and I dare not keep this form any longer....  I must return to the place from which I came.”

Then she sank back into the wall, and vanished altogether:  there was nothing where she had been except the naked plaster.  And Busanshi never saw her again.

This story is written in a Chinese book which the Japanese call “Kai-ten-i-ji.”

“ULTIMATE QUESTIONS”

A memory of long ago....  I am walking upon a granite pavement that rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a cloudless noon.  Shadows are short and sharp:  there is no stir in the hot bright air; and the sound of my footsteps, strangely loud, is the only sound in the street....  Suddenly an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of tingling shock,—­a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion.  The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things visible, are dreams!  Light, color, form, weight, solidity—­all sensed existences—­are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word....

This experience had been produced by study of the first volume of the Synthetic Philosophy, which an American friend had taught me how to read.  I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to sustained effort in such directions.  To learn the “First Principles” occupied me many months:  no other volume of the series gave me equal trouble.  I would read one section at a time,—­rarely two,—­never venturing upon a fresh section until I thought that I had made sure of the preceding.  Very cautious and slow my progress was, like that of a man mounting, for the first time, a long series of ladders in darkness.  Reaching the light at last, I caught a sudden new vision of things,—­a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,—­and from that time the world never again appeared to me quite the same as it had appeared before.