to the imperial barges and take the ladies of the court for
pleasure trips about the lake in the cool of the summer evenings,
as the Empress Dowager did her foreign visitors in later times.

The Emperor in those days was on the lookout for everything
foreign that was of a mechanical nature. Indeed every invention
interested him. In this respect he was diametrically opposite to
the genius of the whole Chinese people. Their faces had ever been
turned backward, and their highest hopes were that they might
approximate the golden ages of the past, and be equal in virtue
to their ancestors. This feeling was so strong that a hundred
years before he mounted the throne, his forefather, Chien Lung,
when he had completed his cycle of sixty years as a ruler,
vacated in favour of his son lest he should reign longer than his
grandfather. Kuang Hsu was therefore the first occupant of the
dragon throne whose face was turned to the future, and whose
chief aim was to possess and to master every method that had
enabled the peoples of the West to humiliate his people.

When he heard that the foreigners had a method of talking to a
distance of ten, twenty, fifty or five hundred miles, he did not
say like the old farmer is reported to have said,--"It caint be
trew, because my son John kin holler as loud as any man in all
this country, an' he caint be heerd mor'n two miles." Kuang Hsu
believed it, and at once ordered that a telephone be secured for
him.

In 1894 the Christian women of China decided to present a New
Testament to the Empress Dowager on her sixtieth birthday which
occurred the following year. New type was prepared, the finest