yin têng—"lamps of mercy" the Chinese name these will-o'-the-wisps—darted and burned.
The days were golden, and the nights smelt sweet.
And from then Muir had but one quarrel with China: it had made Japan seem to him forever commonplace.
James Muir had never enjoyed himself so intensely before: every moment was a picture and a feast. And often now, sitting alone in London, he closes his book-tired eyes and dreams that he is back once more in China, crossing the Sze-chuan hills with a mandarin he admired and a boy he loved, or sipping hot perfumed wine at the indescribable kaleidoscope that was the marriage of Wu Li Chang and Li Lu, and thinking sometimes, not without a sigh, of all he relinquished when the great boat on which Wu Li Chang went to England took him—the tutor—as he well knew, forever from China.
