Of Which it is Written: “In Shallow Water Dragons become the Laughing-stock of Shrimps”
 
At an early gong-stroke of the following day Kai Lung was finally brought up for judgment in accordance with the venomous scheme of the reptilian Ming-shu. In order to obscure their guilty plans all justice-loving persons were excluded from the court, so that when the story-teller was led in by a single guard he saw before him only the two whose enmity he faced, and one who stood at a distance prepared to serve their purpose.
 
“Committer of every infamy and inceptor of nameless crimes,” began Ming-shu, moistening his brush, “in the past, by the variety of discreditable subterfuges, you have parried the stroke of a just retribution. On this occasion, however, your admitted powers of evasion will avail you nothing. By a special form of administration, designed to meet such cases, your guilt will be taken as proved. The technicalities of passing sentence and seeing it carried out will follow automatically.”
 
“In spite of the urgency of the case,” remarked the Mandarin, with an assumption of the evenly-balanced expression that at one time threatened to obtain for him the title of “The Just”, “there is one detail which must not be ignored—especially as our ruling will doubtless become a lantern to the feet of later ones. You appear, malefactor, to have committed crimes—and of all these you have been proved guilty by the ingenious arrangement invoked by the learned recorder of my spoken word—which render you liable to hanging, slicing, pressing, boiling, roasting, grilling, freezing, vatting, racking, twisting, drawing, compressing, inflating, rending, spiking, gouging, limb-tying, piecemeal-pruning and a variety of less tersely describable discomforts with which the time of this court need not be taken up. The important consideration is, in what order are we to proceed and when, if ever, are we to stop?”
 
“Under your benumbing eye, Excellence,” suggested Ming-shu resourcefully, “the precedent of taking first that for which the written sign is the longest might be established. Failing that, the names of all the various punishments might be inscribed on separate shreds of parchment and these deposited within your state umbrella. The first withdrawn by an unbiased—”
 
“High Excellence,” Kai Lung ventured to interrupt, “a further plan suggests itself which—”
 
“If,” exclaimed Ming-shu in irrational haste, “if the criminal proposes to narrate a story of one who in like circumstances—”
 
“Peace!” interposed Shan Tien tactfully. “The felon will only be allowed the usual ten short measures of time for his suggestion, nor must he, under that guise, endeavour to insert an imagined tale.”
 
“Your ruling shall keep straight my bending feet, munificence,” replied Kai Lung. “Hear now my simplifying way. In place of cited wrongs—which, after all, are comparatively trivial matters, as being merely offences against another or in defiance of a local usage—substitute one really overwhelming crime for which the penalty is sharp and explicit.”
 
“To that end you would suggest—?” Uncertainty sat upon the brow of both Shan Tien and Ming-shu.
 
“To straighten out the entangled thread this person would plead guilty to the act—in a lesser capacity and against his untrammelled will—of rejoicing musically on a day set apart for universal woe: a crime aimed directly at the sacred person of the Sublime Head and all those of his Line.”
 
At this significant admission the Mandarin’s expression faded; he stroked the lower part of his face several times and unostentatiously indicated to the two attendants that they should retire to a more distant obscurity. Then he spoke.
 
“When did this—this alleged indiscretion occur, Kai Lung?” he asked in a considerate voice.
 
“It is useless to raise a cloud of evasion before the sun of your penetrating intellect,” replied the story-teller. “The eleventh day of the existing moon was its inauspicious date.”
 
“That being yesterday? Ming-shu, you upon whom the duty of regulating my admittedly vagarious mind devolves, what happened officially on the eleventh day of the Month of Gathering-in?” demanded the Mandarin in an ominous tone.
 
“On such and such a day, benevolence, threescore and fifteen years ago, the imperishable founder of the existing dynasty ascended on a fiery dragon to be a guest on high,” confessed the conscience-stricken scribe, after consulting his printed tablets. “Owing to the stress of a sudden journey significance of the date had previously escaped my weed-grown memory, tolerance.”
 
“Alas!” exclaimed Shan Tien bitterly, “among the innumerable drawbacks of an exacting position the enforced reliance upon an unusually inept and more than ordinarily self-opinionated inscriber of the spoken word is perhaps the most illimitable. Owing to your profuse incompetence that which began as an agreeable prelude to a busy day has turned into a really serious matter.”
 
“Yet, lenience,” pleaded the hapless Ming-shu, lowering his voice for the Mandarin’s private ear, “so far the danger resides in this one throat alone. That disposed of—”
 
“Perchance,” replied Shan Tien; then turning to Kai Lung: “Doubtless, O story-teller, you were so overcome by the burden of your guilt that until this moment you have hidden the knowledge of it deep within your heart?”
 
“Magnificence, the commanding qu............