spurt out the wine.

"In these pages, the scenes depicting the anguish of separation, the
bliss of reunion, and the fortunes of prosperity and of adversity are
all, in every detail, true to human nature, and I have not taken upon
myself to make the slightest addition, or alteration, which might lead
to the perversion of the truth.

"My only object has been that men may, after a drinking bout, or after
they wake from sleep or when in need of relaxation from the pressure of
business, take up this light literature, and not only expunge the traces
of antiquated books, and obtain a new kind of distraction, but that they
may also lay by a long life as well as energy and strength; for it bears
no point of similarity to those works, whose designs are false, whose
course is immoral. Now, Sir Priest, what are your views on the subject?"

K'ung K'ung having pondered for a while over the words, to which he had
listened intently, re-perused, throughout, this record of the stone; and
finding that the general purport consisted of nought else than a
treatise on love, and likewise of an accurate transcription of facts,
without the least taint of profligacy injurious to the times, he
thereupon copied the contents, from beginning to end, to the intent of
charging the world to hand them down as a strange story.

Hence it was that K'ung K'ung, the Taoist, in consequence of his
perception, (in his state of) abstraction, of passion, the generation,
from this passion, of voluptuousness, the transmission of this
voluptuousness into passion, and the apprehension, by means of passion,
of its unreality, forthwith altered his name for that of "Ch'ing Tseng"
(the Voluptuous Bonze), and changed the title of "the Memoir of a Stone"