THE TRIADS AT SHANGHAI 5 4 IN THE DAYS OF THE TAIPINGS rant or with hand net in the numerous canals intersecting the class-room stilled for a time,I stood up backing the the country.Besides this he incubated ducks and had at all book and repeated the whole from beginning to end without times a flock of a thousand or more,feeding noisily all day an error in word or tone.My next lesson-book was the around the sedgy shores of the lake,and racing home more "Patronymics",and this,in its turn,I mastered in a short noisily still at the sunset call of their keeper.Often did we time;so with the next,the "Thousand Word Essay",though children make merry at the eagerness of the ducks racing this was difficult,because disconnected;and when I was madly homeward,scrambling over each other's shoulders,all promoted to the "Childhood's Odes",my heart was filled anxious to be first,and at the quacks of distress from the with joy.My proficiency at my lessons attracted the atten- laggards in the rear,inspired as they were with full tion of my father's cousin,the head of the Soochow branch knowledge,from painful experience,of the sound whipping of our family,Ting Kienlun,his to-name Yaolien,a scholar that the last bird in would receive. of some learning and much refinement;and he proposed that To carry out his fishing duties old Cockeye kept three I should live with him and join his sons in their study of the boats,two large square scows for netting the lake,and a Classics under a tutor.My father readily assented,and so I small swift slipper-boat for canal work;and on one or the spent my youth mainly in the wealthy and cultured city of other I spent many hours.Even before I went to Soochow, Soochow,of which it is said which was in my eleventh year,he had taught me to swim; Shang yu t'ien t'ang with him I had helped to shoot wild duck on the shores of Hsia yu Soo Hang. the lake;I could cast a small hand net made to my size; Above are the halls of Heaven; and I had become expert in handling the slipper-boat.This Below.are Soo(chow)and Hang(chow). was ordinarily just large enough for one passenger lying at My childhood was not spent solely in study,and I had length under the mat cover,and one oarsman,sitting in the outdoor play which strengthened my body,while my teacher stern,pushing the two paddles with his feet and steering developed my mind.The "Great Learning"has it that with another paddle held under his arm.He now had one When the mind is broadened,the body is at ease; made a trifle longer,with room for me to sit in the bow and, but my father,scholar on his one side,but practical ad- with my legs or my arms,push another pair of paddles,and ministrator and countryman.on the other,was rather of in this one-and-a-half man-power boat we made good speed. opinion that a healthy body was the essential condition for In accepting Yaolien's offer,my father made one stipula- a healthy mind,a strange doctrine for Chinese,but one in tion,that,in addition to the month's holiday customary at which,with all due respect for the superior wisdom of the the new year,I should have another month to include the Classics,I think he was right.I had my games which I periods of the Little Heat and the Great Heat (roughly played with my cousins and the sons of the tenants on the July),and besides should spend at home the first five days of estate,but my happiest hours were spent on the water.On each month;as he put it,twenty-five days without a break the shores of the large shallow lake,forming the eastern were quite enough for head work,and the bow must then be boundary of the property,lived Cockeye as he was generally unstrung for five days.This was the plan followed during called from a cast in one eye,his name being Wang Yinshan. the next eight years.The tutors took my cousins and myself Old Coekeye-he seemed old to me,though he had not yet suecessively through the "Canons of Filial Piety,"and the reached his fortieth year when I was in my tenth- "Juvenile Learning"on to the four Books and the five performed a double function on the estate;he was foreman Classics,and so to the Sacred Edict,and in all these we over the fishing on the lake and saw to netting the coarser were well grounded;and,during the whole time,punctually fish found in it;and between-whiles he caught finer fish for on the last day of the month old Cockeye turned up shortly my father's table and the manor house,fishing with cormo-