[163] Our author would here seem to have heard of the famous bull's hide which is mentioned in the first book of the _Æneid_. In any case, the substitution of "stretching" is no improvement on the celebrated device by which the bull's hide was made to enclose so large a space.
A woodsman who had been to market was returning home with his pole across his shoulder,[164] when suddenly he felt it become very heavy at the end behind him, and looking round he saw attached to it the headless trunk of a man. In great alarm, he got his pole quit of the burden and struck about him right and left, whereupon the body disappeared. He then hurried on to the next village, and when he arrived there in the dusk of the evening, he found several men holding lights to the ground as if looking for something. On asking what was the matter, they told him that while sitting together a man's head had fallen from the sky into their midst; that they had noticed the hair and beard were all draggled, but in a moment the head had vanished. The woodsman then related what had happened to himself; and thus one whole man was accounted for, though no one could tell whence he came. Subsequently, another man was carrying a basket when some one saw a man's head in it, and called out to him; whereupon he dropped the basket in a fright, and the head rolled away and disappeared.
[164] The common method of porterage in China is by a bamboo pole over the shoulder with well-balanced burdens hanging from each end. I have often seen children carried thus, sitting in wicker baskets; sometimes for long journeys.
Chü Yao-ju was a Ch'ing-chou man, who, when his wife died, left his home and became a priest.[165] Some years afterwards he returned, dressed in the Taoist garb, and carrying his praying-mat[166] over his shoulder; and after staying one night he wanted to go away again. His friends, however, would not give him back his cassock and staff; so at length he pretended to take a stroll outside the village, and when there, his clothes and other belongings came flying out of the house after him, and he got safely away.
[165] It would be more usual to "renew the guitar string," as the Chinese idiom runs. In the paraphrase of the first maxim of the _Sacred Edict_ we are told that "The closest of all ties is that of husband and wife; but suppose your wife dies, why, you can marry another. But if your brother were to die," &c., &c.