Mr. Jiang glanced at them and burst into laughter, rising to roll up his sleeves.
Mr. Zhuang then turned to Manbao and Bai Shan and said, "Go get some good brushes and paper."
Manbao and Bai Shan exchanged a look and ran off to find the items.
But Mr. Jiang was quite casual; he ground the ink himself and wrote on the spread-out paper. He wrote only one or two characters on each sheet. For Bai Shan, he wrote the character "bright", for Manbao the words "elegant and intelligent", and for Bai Erlang, the character "clear".
He looked at Peng Zhiru and Lu Xiaofu and, smiling, also wrote a character for each of them: "gentle" for one and "endure" for the other.
Peng Zhiru and Lu Xiaofu were extremely pleased. They gently blew on their papers to make the ink dry faster before putting them away.
Once Bai Shan and the others saw the characters Mr. Jiang had written, they understood why Peng Zhiru and Lu Xiaofu had been so excited; his writing really was beautiful.
