The dead to-day all over China hold the living within their grip. They are believed in some mysterious way of having the ability to change the destinies of a family. They can raise it from poverty and meanness to wealth and to the most exalted position, but if they are neglected and offerings are not made to them at the regular seasons, they will take away houses and lands from it, and turn the members of it into beggars.
A man died in a certain village. He was so poor that a grave was dug for him by the roadside and he was buried with but the scantiest of ceremony. He had never shown any ability in the whole course of his life, and he seemed in no way different from the ordinary commonplace looking men that one meets in shoals anywhere.
The eldest son who buried him was a young man of exceptional ability. He was rough and overbearing in his manners and a very unpleasant man to have to oppose, but he had the keen passion of the trader, and seemed to know by instinct every phase of the market, and what it was safe for him to speculate in. As he had no capital of his own, he was compelled to begin his life at the very bottom and to work his way up. This he did with great success, so that in the course of time he amassed a considerable fortune, and his name was known as that of one of the merchant princes in the region in which he lived.
Now, this man's steady rise from poverty to wealth was not put down to his own ability or to any skill that he had shown in the management of his business affairs, but almost entirely to the old father who lay buried at the crossroads. It was he, the son believed, that guided the golden stream that flowed into his life, and it was his mysterious hand that had so prospered the combinations which the son had made, that the firm was built up till it was distinguished for the magnitude of its transactions. So convinced was he of this that he would never allow the grave to be touched, and he would never have a stone put up to show to whom this common-looking, neglected mound of earth belonged. He was afraid lest careless hands should break the spell that hung around it, and perhaps annoy the old man so that the run of prosperity should be broken, and in anger he should send misfortune instead.