the entire crew was accustomed to the curious spectacle of one of the enemy enjoying the most marked attention and hospitality that the ship could afford.
But, besides his imitativeness and shrewdness, the little Mongolian had one accomplishment that gained the awe-struck admiration of his Oriental friends. That was the power of discovering objects at incredible distances as easily by night as by day, a power due partly to inheritance, and partly to his profession. The lad was an interesting specimen of the Oriental class of beings known as rat-catchers. This means more than the word implies. They are not rat-catchers by vocation alone, but, strangely enough, they are born to the trade. In addition to many other talents which he had inherited from a long line of rat-catching ancestry, little Tang-u,—the "rat,"—as the boy was called, had the power of seeing his way clearly in almost the dead blackness of night. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed as though he was endowed with a sixth sense in this matter, being able to walk straight into a dungeon-like room and to bring forth any object without the least hesitancy. Courage, also, he had developed to a rare degree, for the rats in the docks of China, and in the underground passages from warehouse cellar to cellar, and sewer to sewer, where he plied his trade, are the fattest and most savage of the rodent tribe the world over; so large, indeed, that the skins of two of them will make a pair of gloves, and the carcass will supply a family with dried fillet de rodent for a week. These rat-catchers spend days and weeks in the underground passages, and day and night are almost the same to them.
Now that he could no longer exercise his strange gift in his accustomed way, Tang-u would often amuse himself by standing for hours on the deck, peering out through the mist or the darkness in search of things hidden to common eyes. Indeed, among the Americans he soon became known as the "kid with the telescopic eye," while the commander, on various occasions, allowed him to accompany the men in the lookout, where he discovered objects often in advance of the field-glass. Even the dark waters of the ocean were not proof against the vision of the little heathen, whose bright eyes would detect curious fish as they swam around the ship, many feet below the surface; while a fog that blinded
