year. The only vacations are at New Years, in February; on kite flying day in October, and on the feast of the lanterns day. Then fire-crackers pop and snap and bang all day long, as they do on our Fourth of July. When Wung Foo went to school there were a thousand interesting things in the crowded streets, but he never noticed them. He walked along gravely. When he met his . schoolmates he shook his own hands inside his sleeves to show that he was glad to see them. The school was much like a Japanese school, except that the boys sat on stools, with higher stools in front for tables; and the teacher was very cross.
At ten o'clock Wung Foo came home for breakfast. At four he came home for dinner. It was a very good dinner of bird's nest soup, fish, duck eggs, chop-suey, rice and gam-got. When chop-suey is made of bits of chicken, ham, water chestnuts, mushrooms, celery and crisp little barley sprouts, all fried together in peanut oil and dressed with spicy brown sauce, it is very good indeed. Gam-got is little preserved oranges about as big as plums. Sometimes he had chrys-an-the-mum fritters, of the flower petals, with pineapple sauce.
Once Wung Foo went on a journey with his father. He went on a boat up the river. The river was so wide there was room for sail boats in the middle, and for streets of house-boats along the banks. Women washed and cooked on the decks of the house-boats. Children played there with little barrels tied on their backs. If they fell into the water the barrels kept them afloat until some one could pull them into the house again. The people who lived in house boats were poor. Boys no older than himself tended ducks in the marshes. Others fished with big birds that were trained to dive. They were all barefooted. The little girls had big feet. They would always have to work.
Wung Foo saw other little boys and girls picking cotton bolls, and tea leaves, and mulberry leaves to feed silk worms, and planting rice in wet ground. He saw them bending over cotton and silk looms, and carrying heavy jars and tiles at the pottery works. They worked for a few cents a day. They lived in huts and ate nothing but rice and a very little fish, and drank the poorest tea. When he went back home he studied harder than ever. He was glad he was going to be a mandarin, or at least a silk merchant like his father. Perhaps he might go away to be a merchant in Chinatown in San Francisco, America, or to Manila, in the Philippine Islands. But when he got very rich he would go back to China. See The Chinese Empire, page 389.
