The Rat Wedding

Upon the three-and-twentieth of the twelfth moon, on a snowy night, old Ke the villager kept the New Year's vigil not yet done, when he heard beneath the hall a thin music, clear as a reed and a chime, issuing from the chink in the wall. He peeped, and saw ranks of rats, bearing crimson lanterns and carrying a bridal casket, ushering forth a little rat crowned with flowers — stepping with ceremony, as if bearing a daughter to her wedding. Ke had ever hated rats and would have struck, when suddenly he spied at the tail of the train a rat carrying something that glimmered; he looked, and it was the jade cicada his late wife had left him — lost these three years, sought everywhere and never found. Ke marvelled, and stilled his hand. The rat-train crossed the middle court; the wind and snow fell suddenly silent, and moonlight flooded the ground. At the threshold the leading rat looked back, laid the jade cicada upon the step, and bore away an old bronze key from Ke's desk — the key with which Ke locked his grain-store. Ke understood in a flash: the rats, marrying off their daughter, must take a new key to open a new door; and the jade returning, old things go each to its proper lord. At dawn the jade cicada lay on the step, and the bronze key was gone. From that time the grain in the store diminished no more, and the traces of rats grew few. Whenever Ke faced the jade cicada he would sigh: 'All things have their lords; what is forced to stay is lost in the end, and what is willing to return comes back of itself.' The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: Men call the rat a thief, not knowing the rat too keeps the rites of wedding and the heart of requital. The jade's return was not the rat's honesty, but old Ke's single thought of forbearance, that won two things their change of hands. Between heaven and earth all things come and go by their reckoning — save the one word 'forbearance,' which may alter that reckoning.