Speaking in this manner,
King-y-Yang entrusted to Sen a carefully prepared box containing a
score of the insects, obtained at a great cost from a country beyond
the Bitter Water, and after giving him further directions concerning
the journey, and enjoining the utmost secrecy about the valuable
contents of the box, he sent him forth.
"The discreet and sagacious will already have understood the nature of
King-y-Yang's intolerable artifice; but, for the benefit of the
amiable and unsuspecting, it is necessary to make it clear that the
words which he had spoken bore no sort of resemblance to affairs as
they really existed. The district around Yun was indeed involved in a
most unprepossessing destitution, but this had been caused, not by the
absence of any rare and auspicious insect, but by the presence of vast
hordes of locusts, which had overwhelmed and devoured the entire face
the country. It so chanced that among the recently constructed devices
at 'The Pure Gilt Dragon of Exceptional Symmetry' were a number of
elegant representations of rice fields and fruit gardens so skilfully
fashioned that they deceived even the creatures, and attracted, among
other living things, all the locusts in Hankow into that place of
commerce.
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