One day the three friends (for they were deeply that) saw the great Sie'tu, the Buddhist thanksgiving-to-the-earth service, in a great straggling monastery that twisted about a mountain's snowcovered crest, and blinked and twinkled like some monster thing of life and electricity, for its dozen tent-shaped, curling roofs were of beaten brass.
The Scot got a deal of human sight-seeing out of that return journeying. But it was its silent pictures and its wide solitudes that the boy, child though he was, liked best. They moved on homewards through a pulsing sea of flowers and fruit and ripening grain, of song and light and warmth and vivid color, but above them towered the everlasting hills, imperial as China herself, white, cold, snow-wrapped.
The soul of China pulsed and flushed at their feet; the soul of China watched them from her far height: China, Titan, mighty, insolent, older than history; China, lovely, laughing, coquetting with her babbling brooks, playing—like the child she is—with her little wild flowers.
There was a tang of autumn in the air, and the cherries were growing very ripe.
Often at night they lit a fire of brush beside their wayside camp, and sitting in its glow the old man talked long and earnestly to the child. To much of their talk Muir listened, smoking his sweet cob in silence. Some of it was intimate even from his trusted hearing. Nothing was said of the voyage to England or of the years to be lived out there. It had been said for the most already, and almost the subject was taboo. But of the home-*coming to follow and the long years to be lived at home the old man said much. And most of all he talked to the boy of—women. Again and again he told him, as
