sit-round games. The masterpiece of the divine Li Tang, and
its reception by all, including that same Herbert.



VENERATED SIRE (whose breadth of mind is so well developed as to take
for granted boundless filial professions, which, indeed, become vapid
by a too frequent reiteration),--

Your amiable inquiry as to how the barbarians pass their time, when
not employed in affairs of commerce or in worshipping their ancestors,
has inspired me to examine the matter more fully. At the same time
your pleasantly-composed aphorism that the interior nature of persons
does not vary with the colour of their eyes, and that if I searched I
should find the old flying kites and the younger kicking feather
balls or working embroidery, according to their sex, does not appear
to be accurately sustained.

The lesser ones, it is true, engage in a variety of sumptuous
handicrafts, such as the scorching of wooden tablets with the
semblance of a pattern, and gouging others with sharpened implements
into a crude relief; depicting birds and flowers upon the surface of
plates, rending leather into shreds, and entwining beaten iron, brass,
and copper into a diversity of most ingenious complications; but when
I asked a maiden of affectionate and domesticated appearance whether
she had yet worked her age-stricken father's coffin-cloth, she said
that the subject was one upon which she declined to jest, and rapidly
involving herself in a profuse display of emotion, she withdrew,
leaving this one aghast.