[13] “And his friends had the habit of jotting down for his unfailing delight anything quaint or comic that they came across.”—The World on Charles Dickens: 24th July 1878.
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[14] It is related in the Historical Record that when T‘ai Po and Yü Chung visited the southern savages they saw men with tattooed bodies and short hair.
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[15] A fabulous community, placed by geographers to the west of the Dragon city—wherever that may be. So called because the heads of the men are in the habit of leaving their bodies, and flying down to marshy places to feed on worms and crabs. A red ring is seen the night before the flight encircling the neck of the man whose head is about to fly. At daylight the head returns.
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[16] A quotation from the admired works of Wang Po, a brilliant scholar and poet, who was drowned at the early age of twenty-eight, A.D. 675.
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[17] I have hitherto failed in all attempts to identify this quotation.
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[18] The cross-road of the “Five Fathers” is here mentioned, which the commentator tells us is merely the name of the place.
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[19] The past, present, and future life, of the Buddhist system of metempsychosis.
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[20] A certain man, who was staying at a temple, dreamt that an old priest appeared to him beneath a jade-stone cliff, and, pointing to a stick of burning incense, said to him, “That incense represents a vow to be fulfilled; but I say unto you, that ere its smoke shall have curled away, your three states of existence will have been already accomplished.” The meaning is that time on earth is as nothing to the Gods.
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[21] This remark occurs in the fifteenth of the Confucian Gospels, section 22.
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[22] The birth of a boy was formerly signalled by hanging a bow at the door; that of a girl, by displaying a small towel—indicative of the parts that each would hereafter play in the drama of life.
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