Page:The Chinese Boy and Girl.djvu/141

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around the hat, each person present giving one-fifth or one-tenth of a cent.

As I came from school one afternoon, the children had called in from the street a showman with a number of trained mice. He had erected a little scaffolding just inside the gateway, at one side of which there was a small rope ladder, and this with the inevitable gong, and the small boxes in which the mice were kept constituted his entire outfit.

In the boxes he had what seemed to be cotton from the milk-weed which furnished a nest for the mice. These he took from their little boxes one by one, stroked them tenderly, while he explained what this particular mouse would do, put each one on the rope ladder, which they ascended, and performed the tricks expected of them. These were going through a pagoda, drawing water, creeping through a tube, wearing a criminal's collar, turning a