"What does that represent?" I asked him pointing to a child with a bowl in his hand who looked as if he might have been going to the grocer's.
"Oh, that boy is going to buy wine."
The Chinese have never yet realized what a national evil liquor may become. They have little wine shops in the great cities, but they have no drinking houses corresponding to the saloon, and it is not uncommon to see a child going to the wine shop to fetch a bowl of wine. The Buddhist priest indulges with the same moderation as the official class or gentry. Indeed most of the drunkenness we read about in Chinese books is that of poets and philosophers, and in them it is, if not commended, at least not condemned. The attitude of literature towards them is much like that of Thackeray towards the gentlemen of his day.
The child constructed the picture of a Buddhist priest, who, with staff in hand, and a mug of wine, was viewing the beautiful mountains in the distance. He then changed it to one in which an intoxicated man was leaning on a boy's shoulder, the inscription to which said: "Any one is willing to assist a drunken man to return home."
"This," he went on as he changed his blocks, "is a picture of Li Pei, China's greatest poet. He lived more than a thousand years ago. This represents the closing scene in his life. He was crossing the river in a boat, and in a drunken effort to get the moon's reflection from the water, he fell overboard and was drowned." The child pointed to the sail at the same time, repeating the following:
The sail being set,
He tried to get,
The moon from out the main.
I noticed a large number of boat scenes and induced the child to construct some of them for me, which he was quite willing to do, explaining them as he went as readily as our children would explain Old Mother Hubbard or the Old Woman who Lived in her Shoe, by seeing the illustrations.
Constructing one he repeated a verse somewhat like the following:
Alone the fisherman sat,
In his boat by the river's brink,
In the chill and cold and snow,
To fish, and fish, and think.
Then he turned over to two on opposite pages, and as he constructed them he repeated in turn: