Page:Gems of Chinese literature (1922).djvu/200

 wings of dusky silk, as, with a long shrill scream, it whizzed past our boat towards the west. By-and-by, my friends left me, and I slept and dreamed that a lame Taoist priest in a feathery robe passed by on the bank, and, bowing to me, said, “Have you had a pleasant trip, sir, to the Red Wall?” I enquired his name, but he merely bowed again and made no reply. “Ah!” exclaimed I, “I know who you are. Are you not that bird which flew past me last night and screamed?” Just then I awakened with a start. I opened the door of my boat and looked out, but no one was to be seen. 

I was sitting up one night when suddenly a rat began to gnaw. A rap on the couch stopped the noise, which however soon began again. Calling a servant to look round with a light, we noticed an empty sack, from the inside of which came a grating sound, and I at once cried out, “Ha! the rat has got shut in here, and can’t get out.” So we opened the sack, but there was apparently nothing in it, though when we came to throw in the light, there at the bottom lay a dead rat. “Oh!” exclaimed the servant in a fright, “can the animal that was just now gnawing have died so suddenly as this? Or can it have been the rat’s ghost that was making the noise?” Meanwhile, he turned the rat out on the ground, whenaway it went full speed, escaping before we had time to do anything. “’Tis passing strange,” said I, with a sigh, “the cunning of that rat. Shut up in a sack too hard for it to gnaw its way out, it nevertheless gnawed in order to attract attention by the noise; and then it pretended to be dead in order to save its life under the guise of death. Now I have always understood that in intelligence man stands first. Man can tame the dragon, subdue the mastodon, train the tortoise, and carry captive the unicorn. He