The Old Well

In the south of the city lived the Shen family, who had in their court a disused well, long silted and stopped with a stone, abandoned and unused. Young Shen was fond of the chess-board. One night he mislaid a jade weight upon his desk, and the next day sought it everywhere in vain. Sleepless at the midnight hour, he leaned on the rail and listened to the insects. Suddenly he heard a rustling by the well, as of one walking. He opened the door and looked: the stone cover was a little lifted, and from the well leaked a thread of green light. He peered down and saw, not water at the bottom, but a chamber, furnished as of old, where his late grandfather sat upright reading a scroll. Shen was struck with terror and would have cried out; the grandfather raised a finger to his lips, bidding silence, and beckoned him near. Shen, in a daze, saw something reach an arm from the well and set the jade weight upon the rail; then it stretched in again and took away an old inkstone from the desk—the one his grandfather had loved in life. The green light slowly closed, and the stone cover shut. At dawn the jade weight was indeed beneath the rail, but the old inkstone was gone. Shen understood: what he had seen in the well was, it seemed, his grandfather's soul keeping watch over the house, who by night came back for the things he had cherished, and repaid with what was lost. Thenceforth, whenever aught was mislaid, it would often appear by the well the next day, while the small old things of the house dwindled by degrees, none knowing whither they had gone. The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: The old well is like a coffer—it receives what men have lost, and claims back what it loves. That the dead should take is not greed, but remembrance. The living, given back their loss, need not think on the longing of him who took. So it is, broadly, with meeting and parting in the world: thou sendest me back, I take what thou didst prize; the well speaks not, yet keeps its own account.