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                     150

their departed glory.

What impressions and reactions one has. Here one could see the impressions of very human lives, lives characterized by the same likes and dislikes, the same whims and fancies that characterize any of the young people of today.  Curiously modern lives were lived in these rooms that had been the birth-places of emperoros for generations, these rooms lined with rare and choice specimens of jades, and enamels, and ceramics, and clocks. Yet how circumscribed they were. The rooms with their foreign style furniture seemed in hopelessly poor taste to us. So many of their things had come at a time when European taste was at a low ebb as we now think of it.  There is no reason why a boy emperor industriously studying English and playing basket-ball on a new court built where a pavilion had burned should have good taste as we think of good taste.  Nor is there reason why a Chinese girl, naively interested in all sorts of things like cameras and bicycles should know that the pianos and organs inher apartments were not well placed, or that oilcloth does not make an acceptable covering for a table in a throneroom.  There is no reason why I should judge them by my standards, but - purely Chinese apartments are seldom annoying to me, the exceptions being those cases when the best taste of the Chinese themselves would show them to be not good; foreign and Chinese styles and furniture can be harmoniously and pleasantly combined, as witness any of several private homes in Peking; foreign styles can be in very poor taste, but may be considerably helped by reasonable consistency in the style; foreign junk, no matter how elaborate and expensive, combined with other foreign junk and some good things both Chinese and foreign, unless the co^[[m]]bination or planning and decoration be done by some experienced and skilled hand, can produce a most pathetic depressing ensemble.  The junk that is foisted on emperors - platinum frying pans, celluloid curling irons, fur-lined bath-tubs cannot be cited in comparison.  I at least am forced to the conclusion that the Sons of Heaven, at least many of them, are exceedingly ordinary men, no better than American millionaires, and often not so willing as the [[strikethrough]] n [[/strikethrough]] latter to avail themselves of their opportunities.  Of course we know theoreticallyn that the emperors are only men, and often poor, weak men, but I rather hate to have it forced upon my attention i this way.  It is thrilling to walk in these forbidden precincts, it is worth-while to see these places and know what one may know from them