The vision vanished altogether; he was standing once more under the portico amongst the surroundings which were familiar to him.  The strange star was still shining in the sky.  He went back through the folding-doors of the piazza into the dining-room.  His gloom and his perplexity had been lifted from him; he felt quite happy; he could not have explained why.  He called his slave and told him to get plenty of provisions on the morrow, for he expected friends to dinner.  He added that he wanted nothing further and that the slaves could go to bed.

CHUN WA

To Henry de C. Ward

His name was Chun Wa; possibly there was some more of it, but that is all I can remember.  He was about four or five years old, and I made his acquaintance the day we arrived at the temple.  It was at the end of September.  We had left Mukden in order to take part in what they said was going to be a great battle.  I don’t know what the village was called at which we arrived on the second day of our march.  I can only remember that it was a beautiful and deliciously quiet spot, and that we established ourselves in a temple; that is to say not actually in the temple itself, but in the house of the priest.  He was a Buddhist who looked after the deities of the place, which were made of carved and painted wood, and lived in a small pagoda.  The building consisted of three quadrangles surrounded by a high stone wall.  The first of these quadrangles, which you entered from the road, reminded me of the yard in front of any farm.  There was a good deal of straw lying about, some broken ploughshares, buckets, wooden bowls, spades, and other implements of toil.  A few hens hurried about searching for grains here and there; a dog was sleeping in the sun.  At the further end of the yard a yellow cat seemed to have set aside a space for its exclusive use.  This farmyard was separated from the next quadrangle by the house of the priest, which occupied the whole of the second enclosure; that is to say the living rooms extended right round the quadrangle, leaving a square and open space in the centre.  The part of the house which separated the second quadrangle from the next consisted solely of a roof supported by pillars, making an open verandah, through which from the second enclosure you saw into the third.  The third enclosure was a garden, consisting of a square grass plot and some cypress trees.  At the further end of the garden was the temple itself.

We arrived in the afternoon.  We were met by an elderly man, the priest, who put the place at our disposal and established us in the rooms situated in the second quadrangle to the east and west.  He himself and his family lived in the part of the house which lay between the farmyard and the second enclosure.  The Cossacks of the battery with which I was living encamped in a field on the other side of the farmyard, but the treasure chest was placed in the farmyard itself, and a sentry stood near it with a drawn sword.