of the eunuchs from the imperial palace, wandering about the city

in search of something to please little Tsai Tien, dropped into
this store on Legation Street and bought some of these foreign

toys for his infant Majesty.
They had already ransacked the city for Chinese toys. They had

gone to every fair, visited every toy-shop, called upon every
private dealer, and paid high prices for samples of their best

work made especially for the royal child. There were crowing
cocks and cackling hens; barking dogs and crying infants; music

balls and music carts; horns, drums, diabolos and tops; there
were gingham dogs and calico cats; camels, elephants and fierce

tigers; and a thousand other toys, if only he had had other
children to share them with him. But none of them pleased him.

They lacked that subtile something which was necessary to
minister to the peculiargenius of the child.

Among the foreign toys there were some in which there was
concealed a secret spring which seemed to impart life to the

otherwise dead plaything. Wind them up and they would move of
their own energy. This was what the boy needed,--something to

appeal to that machine-loving disposition which nature had given
him, and Budge and Toddy were never more curious to know "what

made the wheels go round" than was little Tsai Tien. He played
with them as toys until overcome by curiosity, when, like many

another child, he tore them apart and discovered the secret
spring. This was as much of a revelation to the eunuchs as to the

child, and they went and bought other toys of a more curious
pattern, and a more intricate design, and it was not long until,

at the instigation of the enterprising Dane, the toy-shops of
Europe were manufacturing playthings specially designed to please

the almond-eyed baby Emperor in the yellow-tiled palace in
Peking.

As the child grew the business of the Dane shopkeeper increased.
His stock became larger and more varied, and Tsai Tien continued

to be a profitablecustomer. There were music boxes and music
carts--real music carts, not like those from the Chinese

shops,--trains of cars, wheeled boats, striking clocks and Swiss
watches which, when the stem was pulled, would strike the hour or

half or quarter, and all these were bought in turn by the eunuchs
and taken into the palace. As the Emperor grew to boyhood the

Danish shopkeeper supplied toys suitable to his years from his
inexhaustible shelves, until all the most intricate and wonderful

toys of Europe, suitable for a boy, had passed through the hands
of Kuang Hsu,--"continued brilliancy," as his name implied--and

he seemed to be making good the meaning of his name.
We would not lead any one to believe that Kuang Hsu was an ideal

child. He was not. If we may credit the reports that came from
the palace in those days, he had a temper of his own. If he were

denied anything he wanted, he would lie down on his baby back on
the dirty ground and kick and scream and literally "raise the

dust" until he got it. My wife tells me that not infrequently
when she called at the Chinese homes, and they set before her a

dish of which she was especially fond, and she had eaten of it as
much as she thought she ought, the ladies would ask in a

good-natured way in reply to some of her remarks about her
voracious appetite, "Shall we get down and knock our heads on the

floor, and beg you not to eat too much, and make yourself sick,
like the eunuchs do to the Emperor?" There is nothing to wonder

at that Kuang Hsu, without parental restraint, and fawned upon by
cringing eunuchs and serving maids, should have been a spoiled

child; the wonder is that he was not worse than he was.
One day in 1901 while the court was absent at Hsian, and the

front gate of the Forbidden City was guarded by our "boys in
blue," I obtained a pass and visited the imperial palace. The

apartments of the Emperor consisted of a series of one-story
Chinese buildings, with paper windows around a large central pane

of glass, tile roof and brick floor. The east part of the
building appeared to be the living-room, about twenty by

twenty-five feet. The window on the south side extended the
entire length of the room, and was filled with clocks from end to

end. There were clocks of every description from the finest
French cloisonne to the most intricatecuckoo clocks from which a

bird hopped forth to announce the hour, and each ticking its own
time regardless of every other. Tables were placed in various

parts of the room, on each of which were one, two or three
clocks. Swiss watches of the most curious and unique designs hung

about the walls. Two sofas sat back to back in the centre of the
room, and a beautiful little gilt desk on which was the most

wonderful of all his clocks, with several large foreign chairs
upholstered in plush and velvet, completed the furniture. I sat

down in one of these chairs to rest, for it was a hot summer day,
and immediately there proceeded from beneath me sweet strains of

music from a box concealed beneath the cushion. It was not only a
surprise, it was soothing and restful; and I was prepared to see

an electric fan pop out of somewhere and fan me to sleep. It was
really an Oriental fairy tale of an apartment.

As Kuang Hsu grew to boyhood he heard that out in this great
wonderful world, which he had never seen except with the eyes of

a child, there was a method of sending messages to distant cities
and provinces with the rapidity of a flash of lightning. For

centuries he and his ancestors had been sending their edicts, and
their Peking Gazette or court newspaper--the oldest journal in

the world--by runner, or relays of post horses, and the
possibility of sending them by a lightning flash appealed to him.

He believed in doing things, and, as we shall see later, he
wanted to do them as rapidly as they could be done. He therefore

ordered that a telegraphoutfit be secured for him, which he
"played with" as he had done with his most ingenious toys, and

the telegraph was soon established for court use throughout the
empire.

One day a number of officials came to us at the Peking University
and in the course of a conversation they said:

"The Emperor has heard that the foreigners have invented a talk
box. Is that true?"

"Quite true," we replied, "and as we have one in the physical
laboratory of the college we will let you see it."

We had one of the old Edison phonographs which worked with a
pedal, and looked very much like a sewing-machine, and we took

them to the laboratory, allowed one of them to talk into it, and
then set the machine to repeating what had been told it. The

officials were delighted and it was not long until they again
appeared and insisted on buying it as a present for the Emperor,

for in this way better than any other they might hope to obtain
official recognition and position.

The Emperor then heard that the foreigners had invented a
"fire-wheel cart," but whether he had ever been informed that

they had built a small railroad at Wu-Sung near Shanghai, and
that the Chinese had bought it, and then torn it up and thrown it

into the river we cannot say. There are many things the officials
and people do which never reach the imperial ears. However that

may be, when Kuang Hsu heard of the railroad and the carts that
were run by fire, he wanted one, and he would not be satisfied

until they had built a narrow gauge railroad along the west shore
of the lotus lake in the Forbidden City, and the factories of

Europe had made two small cars and an engine on which he could
take the court ladies for a ride on this unusual merry-go-round.

The road and the cars and the engine were still there when I
visited the Forbidden City in 1901, but they were carried away to

Europe by some of the allies as precious bits of loot, before the
court returned.