Some one at last suggested that if they humoured her to the extent of sprinkling her with a light covering of earth which she could easily throw off as soon as the desire of life once more asserted itself, she might be permanently restored to a normal condition and all might be well. This suggestion was acted upon. Some handfuls of earth were thrown loosely over the living and the dead, each mourner, in accordance with custom, contributing a portion.[185] Having by this time concluded the sacrificial rites and ceremonies, the mourners now withdrew from the graveside. When some of the nearest relatives of Chang Shih returned an hour later they found that the light covering of earth had not been disturbed. The desire of life had never asserted itself after all. The girl was dead.
Carefully and tenderly she was taken up and brought back to the sad bridal chamber that had witnessed no bridal. Long before her beautiful body had been prepared for burial and placed in its splendid coffin her fame had already spread far through town and countryside. Vast was the crowd of mourners who, when her body was once more laid beside that of her husband, never to be disturbed again, flocked from distances of over a thousand _li_ to show their admiration of the bravest of women and most faithful of wives.
With the exception of the last, all these little stories have been translated almost word for word from the official records of Weihaiwei and the three neighbouring districts. Similar cases could be collected by the thousand. Honorific portals and handsome marble monuments stand by the roadside in every part of the Empire, silent witnesses to noble Chinese womanhood. There is not a district in China that does not possess its roll of women who have sacrificed their lives in obedience to what they believed to be the call of a sacred obligation. Probably none but the most bigoted or the most ignorant will read of these poor women--many of them hardly more than children--with feelings of either contempt or abhorrence. They died no doubt from a mistaken sense of duty: but to die for an idea that is based on error surely requires as much courage and resolution as to die for an idea that is radiant with truth, and--what is perhaps of greater practical significance--the women who go willingly to the grave for a cause that to us seems a poor one may be counted on to suffer as cheerfully and die as bravely for a cause that is truly great.