I was rather alarmed by it myself and was thinking of returning to the city. I heard that Lien-shu's grandmother was among those afflicted and that she was in a very serious condition because of her age. There was no physician in the village. Lien-shu's immediate family consisted only of his grandmother, who lived a simple, quiet life with a maid-servant. Lien-shu had lost his parents in his childhood and had been brought up by this grandmother. She suffered a great deal of privation in her day, but now she was without wants. Since Lien-shu was unmarried, his house was naturally a very quiet and lonely one. This was probably one of the things that caused people to look upon him as somewhat odd.
Cold Stone Mountain was one hundred li by land, seventy li by water, from the city, requiring at least four days for a special messenger to reach Lien-shu and back. In the monotony of village life, an event like this was news of the first magnitude, which everyone wanted to find out about. On the second day it was said that her condition had become critical and that a special messenger had been despatched. But she breathed her last during the fourth watch of the same night, her last words being, "Why can't I have a last meeting with Lien-shu?"
The head and nearer members of the clan, representatives from the grandmother's family, and idlers gathered in a crowded room to devise ways and means to cope with the situation. They figured that by the time Lien-shu arrived it ought to be encoffining time. The coffin and burial clothes had been prepared long in advance[1] and required no atten-
- ↑ Death being one of the three most important events in a person's life, the Chinese make preparations for it as well as for the other two—birth and marriage. It is not uncommon for elderly people to select their coffins and store them in a spare room in the house.
