Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THEY left the room, and crossed through the courtyard, past the devil-screen, to the outer door, and into the outer grounds. Theoretically Ch'eng Shao Yiin passed all her hours within her own apartments and in the "flowery" courtyard, as a Chinese woman of high caste should. Actually she went daily here, there and everywhere about her vast domain, her journey ings limited only by her whim, and her face and voice as familiar to every coolie on the place as the trees and the red roofs of the houses were. At first the house had been built about two courtyards, as a Chinese home should be built, but the many marriages, and the lush influx of baby-life had first crammed and cramped it, and then burst through it quite; and that many of her children should not be roofless, Yim had caused a grove of additional home- quarters to jut out again and again from every wall, and from them others, like red-topped mushrooms, quarters leading all into the others, strung together by doors and courtyards, and that were houses in themselves except in name, and independent homes but for the vigorous over-ruling of Ch'eng Shao Yiin, and that in their irregular, straggling, sloping red-roofed mass spread over several acres. But so wide were the gardens in which they lay, and so vast the fields and groves and hilly vineyards and quarries circling the gardens about, that the great congerie of linked buildings looked snug and homelike. at They were all of but one story. In Pekin it was against the law—and in China law is obeyed—to erect a dwelling of more than one story—because Chinese ladies spend their lives within home-walls, and depend upon the courtyards of the "flowery" quarters for fresh air and sunshine. And so jealous is Chinese law and Chinese sentiment of the comfort and we...