The next morning Nicholas proceeded on his mission, and, as the courts of the palace were crowded with soldiers and mandarins of various ranks, in waiting to receive the great lords of state, who were that day to have audience with the Emperor, he managed to pass through the crowd without being once challenged. With but little difficulty, he found the door mentioned by Ki, and passing through by means of the key, he entered a narrow lane between two walls. Near the inner wall stood the mulberry-tree, up which he clambered quickly, for he knew not who might enter the passage. When, by means of one of the branches, he had gained the top of the wall, his eyes drank in a new pleasure. There, before, beneath were the magnificent gardens of the inner palace, and so charmed were his senses that for a minute it seemed as if the penalty of death were but a small price for the vision. The enclosed grounds were of many miles extent, and so varied in their arrangement, that they might have served for a model of the empire itself. There was something of most things natural and artificial in China: towering mountains cut into terraces and planted with trees of rarity and beauty; fertile valleys laid out in orange groves and intermingled with murmuring rivulets; then bridges of tinted marble, wrought to resemble flying dragons, whose eyes and scales were fashioned from colored metals, flew across small lakes of clear, transparent water, in which, as a paradise of their own, gamboled shoals of gold and silver fish, which at that time had not been brought to Europe; then orchards of fruit trees, making the morning air redolent with the mingled scents of rare specimens of pears, apples, peaches, citrons, apricots, muscadine grapes, pomegranates, and oranges. The sides of the main canal, from which the dripping rivulets sprang, were embossed with cypress and mulberry-trees, whose feet seemed planted in a sprinkled fringe of water melons. On this canal, with its awning of yellow silk and golden fringe, floated the gilded japanned pleasure barge of the ladies.

For a time the boy's head swam with a new sensation. Such, thought he, must have been the garden of that Emperor whose jealousy of the powers of the cruel winter over his summer beauties caused him to waste the revenue of a kingdom and the industry of a whole people in creating a garden of artificial flowers, forgetting that the annual decay was alone the cause of the ever-living freshness and perfume of nature.

Then the sweet scents and beauteous sight tired Nicholas, for he thought of the suffering, starving people. Surely it should not be possible for such a paradise to exist in the midst of so much treason and rotten-heartedness, and then the bold sea boy thought of his own rough life, and became disgusted with himself for dwelling upon so much sensuousness, for he knew that the empire had never smiled and prospered with a happy, peaceable and well-fed people, except when the Emperor had set the example of temperance and labor; and, moreover, that luxury and indolence had ever preceded the downfall of dynasties; and then by far more interesting became the cotton, the tallow and the mulberry-trees that Heaven had bestowed upon the land of China for the support of its hundreds of millions, and which had no vocation in such a garden of luxury.

As it must be interesting to my young readers, I will give a description of these singularly valuable trees. The seed of the cotton shrub is sown by the husbandmen on the same day that they get in the harvest. When the rain has moistened the earth the shrub thrusts itself forward to a height of about two feet, and in the month of August gives forth a yellow or a red flower, which fades into a pod, which on the fortieth day after the appearance of the flower divides itself into three parts, each containing a wrapping of pure white cotton, similar in size to the ball of the silk-worm. At this period, the husbandmen fasten the ball to the pod, leaving it till the following year, when the fibres of the cotton become so securely fastened to the seeds, that the husbandman is compelled to separate them by means of two thin rollers, one of wood and the other of iron, placed so close to each other, that in passing the cotton between them, the naked seed is exuded from behind. The cotton is then carded and ready to be converted into calico, an employment that gives food to many thousands of people.

Of equal value and more curious is the tallow-tree, which lights the whole of the empire. While the leaves and long stalks of this plant cause it to resemble the aspen and the birch, its trunk and branches resemble in shape, height, and size the cherry-tree. From the grey bark, spring long elastic branches, the leaves of which grow but from the middle to the end, where they finish in a tuft, where the fruit grows in a hard brown husk of triangular form. The husk generally contains three kernels, covered with a thin substance resembling white tallow. When the husk begins to open and fall away, the fruit gradually appears. Each kernel contains another of the size of a hemp seed, which from its oleaginous nature is converted into oil.

To make the tallow, the shell and kernel are beaten together in boiling water till the surface becomes covered with fat, which when cold, condenses; then, by adding fair proportions of linseed oil and wax to give consistency, they have produced the material which, when shaped around a wick of hollow reed, produces the candles in use in China. Thus does nature and the ingenuity of the people create from this extraordinary tree a double means of lighting the empire.

As for the mulberry-tree, it is so well known that I need but tell you, that after rice, the Chinese consider its culture as a sacred duty, and deservedly so, for by feeding the silk-worm, it not only clothes the people, but silk, being in immense demand over the known world, is the primary means of giving them employment; indeed the mulberry-tree is an "institution," and of such ancient date, that even in four thousand years old China, which contains the oldest records in the world, there is no authentic record of its discovery. There is a legend, however, "that, till the days of Ti-Long, the wife of the Emperor Hoang-ti, the people were savages, and used the skins of animals for clothing, but her far-sighted majesty noticed that as the people were many, and the animals few, they would soon become short of garments, when, like the parent of invention, she was pushed to a discovery that worms might be made the greatest manufacturers of her empire;" and that there is some truth in this fable seems likely, as, from the earliest times, the Empress of China has had a portion of the grounds of the palace planted as a mulberry grove, where, at certain periods of the year, she goes in state, to show her interest in the silk manufacture, by gathering three mulberry leaves, and unwinding a quantity of silk. Lastly, I may tell you, that the most learned men and the greatest ministers have devoted a great portion of their lives to teach the people "how to bring up and feed silk worms, so as to obtain the greatest quantity and best quality of silk."

Is it not unjust that the race of worms should have been so long despised, when, for thousands of years, one of their representatives has been at the base of the prosperity of the largest, most populated, and longest-enduring empire since the foundation of the world?