14(> CHINESE PUZZLEDOM 



blandly replied, "the barber cut it off yesterday, Sir; it is 

 not the fashion to wear that appendage in these days of 

 restored glory."* That foreigner made the trivial mistake 

 of using the oblique "sinking" tone instead of the even 

 "upper" tone for whip; it was only a small matter of 

 nuance, but the urchin took him at his word and answered 

 him accordingly. 



"It's a fine day" observed an acquaintance of mine 

 once in what he thought was unimpeachable mandarin to a 

 farm-labourer, ploughing a sludgy rice-field with a water- 

 buffalo thickly coated with fluid mud. "I don't understand 

 a single word of your foreign speech," grunted the rustic, 

 knee-deep in the ooze and staring blankly. "He is not 

 speaking any foreign language; he says it's a fine day," 

 I ventured to explain in the best accents I could command : 

 "t'a shuo chin t'ien t'ien hao, ah\" laying special stress on 

 the final expletive as the natives have the trick of doing. 

 "O-oh!" drawled the bucolic swain with a significant grin 

 as he laboured muddily on: "i tien 'rh pu ts'o; clung t'ien 

 Vien hao, pu ching t'ien t'ien pu hao," which rendered in 

 English was, "exactly so; ploughing the field makes the 

 field good; if the field be not ploughed; the field will not be 

 good." There was no lack of logic in this; but I cannot tell 

 to this day whether Nature had formed that son of the soil 

 into a wag, so that he could perpetrate his waggishness on 

 us, or whether the primeval simplicity of a mind matured 

 in mud, really precluded him from receiving impressions 

 not bearing direct reference to his immediate surroundings 

 of unhallowed mire. That is one of the puzzles I shall 

 never solve. 



The books of the country, containing the thoughts of 

 master minds and written generations ago, teem with literary 

 and ethic puzzles. Not only are their obscurer passages 

 variously expounded by various commentators, a clear proof 

 of amphibology, but characters are deliberately singled out 

 and held to signify contrary meanings. What is a tyro in 

 the pursuit of knowledge to do when his authorities conflict, 

 and his teachers with malice prepense make Confucius worse 

 confounded? One may as well ask what in the world is the 

 poor patient to do when doctors disagree ; when one declares 

 that if he takes the drug he dies, and the other insists that 

 if he does'nt take it he dies? Ch'ih yeh ssu, pu ch'ih yeh 

 ssii; tscn mo hao ni? I will leave you to unriddle this for 

 yourselves. When a native finds himself in a predicament 



*3fc or 



