Six Records of a Floating Life (Chapter two: Relaxation of Leisure 05)

    Poor scholars who live in crowded houses should follow the method of the boatmen in our native district who make clever arrangements with their limited space on the sterns of their boats by devising certain modifications, such as making a series of successive elevations one after another, and using them as beds, of which there may be three in a little room, and separating them with papered wooden partitions. The effect will be compact and wonderful to look at, like surveying a long stretch of road, and one will not feel the cramping of space.

    When my wife and I were staying at Yangchow, we lived in a house of only two beams, but the two bedrooms, the kitchen and the parlour were all arranged in this method, with an exquisite effect and great saving of space. Yun once said to me laughingly, "The arrangements are exquisite enough, but after all, they lack the luxurious atmosphere of a rich man's house. " It was so indeed.

     Once I visited my ancestral tombs on the hill and found some pebbles of great beauty, with faint tracings on them. On coming back, I talked it over with Yun, and said, "People mix putty with Hsuanchow stones in white stone basins, because the colours of the two elements blend. These yellow pebbles of this hill, however, are different, and although they are rugged and simple, they will not blend in colour with putty. What can we do?” “Take some of the worse quality, "she said, "pound them into small pieces and mix them in the putty before it is dry, and perhaps when it is dry, the colour will be uniform."

    So we did as she suggested, and took a rectangular Yi-hsing earthen basin, on which we piled up a mountain peak on the left coming down in undulations to the right. On its back, we made rugged square lines in the style of rock paintings of Ni Yunlin, so that the whole looked like a rocky precipice overhanging a river. At one corner we made a hollow place, which we filled with mud and planted with multi-leaf white duckweed, while the rocks were planted with dodder. This took us quite a few days to finish.

    In late autumn, the dodder grew all over the hill, like wistarias hanging down from a rock. The red dodder flowers made a striking contrast to the white duckweed, which had grown luxuriantly, too, from the pond underneath. Looking at it, one could imagine oneself transported to some fairy region.

    We put this under the eaves, and discussed between ourselves where we should build a covered terrace by the water, where we should put a garden arbour, and where we should put a stone inscription: "Where petals drop and waters flow." And Yun further discussed with me where we could build our home, where we could fish, and where we could go up for a better view of the distance, all so absorbed in it as if we were moving to live in that little imaginary universe.

    One night, two cats were fighting for food and fell down over the eaves and accidentally broke the whole thing into pieces, basin and all. I sighed and said, "The gods seem to be jealous of even such a little effort of ours. ” And we both shed tears.