Page 28 - incense-bearers of han

presently issued forth with as many layers of clothes on as he could carry, high boots

to covering his head (with a flap hanging down his back) from which only his nose
and mustache were visible.

He sat on the upholstered side of the barrow, tucked one leg under and allowed the

other to dangle. The man who was to provide the power stood waiting, a woven strap
with a loop in each end, over his stalwart shoulders. When the old gentleman was
comfortably seated he stooped over, slipped the loops over the ends of the shafts, and
trundled Mr. Hu out of his gate and down the street of his village for a visit, the

duration of which none knew, himself included. The townspeople exclaimed to
themselves in muttered undertones at this strangest of all the acts of the capricious old
patriarch—“He goes out of the gate on the first day of the big year!”

Four hours were required to cover the thirteen and a fraction miles from the
mud-fenced village of the Hu family to the town of Yee Hsü, and the short winter‟s
day was drawing to a close as the iron-rimmed wheel of Mr. Hu‟s wheel-barrow
rumbled noisily over the well-worn flagstone pavement of the street inside of the gate,

to break rudely upon the New Year stillness of a normally-busy thoroughfare. Doors
of stores boarded to the outside were inwardly the scenes of Bacchanalian festivities
and gambling orgies.

A lone man at the side of the street seated by a table on which there rested a Book,
was the only person visible to the stranger on the wheel-barrow.

The lone man was Elder Chu himself. He looked up at the sound of the

approaching vehicle and immediately recognized the traveler in spite of his wraps. He
hastened to meet him and in his joy at seeing his friend, forgot all decorum and threw
his arms around Mr.Hu in a warm embrace, as he cried:

“I knew you would come, and I know you are going to be saved! I know you are
going to be saved! You came out of your gate on the first day of the big year! I know
you are going to be saved!”

“For shame!” sputtered Mr. Hu, thrusting him away, “for you to act in this
undignified fashion, and shouting all that jargon that „you know I am going to be
saved!‟ And what mean you, the head of this village, to be sitting in the street behind a
table with a book on it as though you were an ordinary fortune-teller!”

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