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"Ch'i Erh," Li Wan thereupon retorted, "is also not a very good hand at verses, let therefore cousin Ch'in have a try!" Pao-ch'ai had no alternative but to express her acquiescence. "Let the three words 'red plum blossom," she then suggested, "be used for rhymes; and let each person compose an heptameter stanza.
"In that case," Ying Ch'un said, "let me fix the metre." With these words, she walked up to the book-case, and, extracting a volume, she opened it, at random, at some verses which turned out to be a heptameter stanza. Then handing it round for general perusal, everybody had to compose lines with seven words in each.
Afterwards, look over the one hundred and twenty stanzas of Lao T'u, in the heptameter rule; and next read a hundred or two hundred of the heptameter four-lined stanzas by Li Ch'ing-lieu. When you have, as a first step, digested these three authors, and made them your foundation, you can take T'ao Yuan-ming, Ying, Liu, Hsieh, Yuean, Yue, Pao and other writers and go through them once.
She furthermore directed that such tablets as were already put up, should not be dismounted, and she forthwith took the lead and composed an heptameter stanza, the burden of which was: Hills it enclasps, embraces streams, with skill it is laid out: What task the grounds to raise! the works to start and bring about!
As luck would have it, on this day Tai-jui was, on account of business, compelled to go home; and having left them as a task no more than a heptameter line for an antithetical couplet, explaining that they should find a sentence to rhyme, and that the following day when he came back, he would set them their lessons, he went on to hand the affairs connected with the class to his elder grandson, Chia Jui, whom he asked to take charge.
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