Various - Happy Days for Boys and Girls

“Shall I hire a palanquin?” thought Chang Wang, stroking his thin mustaches; “no, a palanquin would cost too much money. Shall I take my passage in a trading vessel?”

The rich trader shook his head, and the pigtail behind it – such a passage would have to be paid for.

“I know what I’ll do,” said the miser to himself; “I’ll ask my uncle Fing Fang to take me in his fishing-boat down the great river. It is true that it will make my journey a long one; but then I shall make it for nothing. I’ll go to the fisherman Fing Fang, and settle the matter at once.”

The business was soon arranged, for Fing Fang would not refuse his rich nephew a seat in his boat. But he, like every one else, was disgusted at Chang Wang’s meanness; and as soon as the dealer had left his hovel, thus spoke Fing Fang to his sons, Ko and Jung: —

“Here’s a fellow who has scraped up money enough to build a second Porcelain Tower, and he comes here to beg a free passage in a fishing-boat from an uncle whom he has never so much as asked to share a dish of his birds’-nests soup!”

“Birds’-nests soup, indeed!” exclaimed Ko; “why, Chang Wang never indulges in luxuries such as that. If dogs’ flesh were not so cheap, he’d grudge himself the paw of a roasted puppy!”

“And what will Chang Wang make of all his money at last?” said Fing Fang, more gravely; “he cannot carry it away with him when he dies.”

“O, he’s gathering it up for some one who will know how to spend it!” laughed Jung. “Chang Wang is merely fishing for others; what he gathers, they will enjoy.”

It was a bright, pleasant day when Chang Wang stepped into the boat of his uncle, to drop slowly down the great Yang-se-kiang. Many a civil word he said to Fing Fang and his sons, for civil words cost nothing. Chang Wang sat in the boat, twisting the ends of his long mustaches, and thinking how much money each row of plants in his tea-fields might bring him. Presently, having finished his calculations, the miser turned to watch his relations, who were pursuing their fishing occupation in the way peculiar to China. Instead of rods, lines, or nets, the Fing Fang family was provided with trained cormorants, which are a kind of bird with a long neck, large appetite, and a particular fancy for fish.

It was curious to watch a bird diving down in the sunny water, and then suddenly come up again with a struggling fish in his bill. The fish was, however, always taken away from the cormorant, and thrown by one of the Fing Fangs into a well at the bottom of the boat.

“Cousin Ko,” said the miser, leaning forward to speak, “how is it that your clever cormorants never devour the fish they catch?”

“Cousin Chang Wang,” replied the young man, “dost thou not see that each bird has an iron ring round his neck, so that he cannot swallow? He only fishes for others.”

“Methinks the cormorant has a hard life of it,” observed the miser, smiling. “He must wish his iron ring at the bottom of the Yang-se-kiang.”

Fing Fang, who had just let loose two young cormorants from the boat, turned round, and from his narrow slits of Chinese eyes looked keenly upon his nephew.

“Didst thou ever hear of a creature,” said he, “that puts an iron ring around his own neck?”

“There is no such creature in all the land that the Great Wall borders,” replied Chang Wang.

Fing Fang solemnly shook the pigtail which hung down his back. Like many of the Chinese, he had read a great deal, and was a kind of philosopher in his way.

“Nephew Chang Wang,” he observed, “ I know of a creature (and he is not far off at this moment) who is always fishing for gain – constantly catching, but never enjoying. Avarice – the love of hoarding – is the iron ring round his neck; and so long as it stays there, he is much like one of our trained cormorants – he may be clever, active, successful, but he is only fishing for others.”

I leave my readers to guess whether the sharp dealer understood his uncle’s meaning, or whether Chang Wang resolved in future not only to catch, but to enjoy. Fing Fang’s moral might be good enough for a heathen, but it does not go nearly far enough for a Christian. If a miser is like a cormorant with an iron ring round his neck, the man or the child who lives for his own pleasure only, what is he but a greedy cormorant with the iron ring? Who would wish to resemble a cormorant at all? The bird knows the enjoyment of getting ; let us prize the richer enjoyment of giving . Let me close with an English proverb, which I prefer to the Chinaman’s parable – “Charity is the truest epicure, for she eats with many mouths.”

OH how cold and miserable everything is! Hardly a thought to be uppermost on Christmas eve in the mind of a little school-boy; and yet it was that which filled the mind of Charlie Earle on the Christmas eve of which I am going to tell you. Only a few hours before, he had been as happy as any boy could be. Everybody was going home, and everybody was in the highest spirits and full of the most delightful hopes of what the holidays would bring them; and now everybody except Charlie has gone home, and he is left alone in the dreary school-room, knowing that at any rate Christmas day, and maybe many other days, are to be spent away from home, and from all the pleasant doings which he had pictured to himself and others only the very day before.

The coming of the post-bag had been scarcely noticed in the school-room that morning. So when old Bunce, the butler, looked in at the door and said, “Master Earle is wanted in the doctor’s room,” the boys all wondered, and Charlie’s neighbor whispered to him, “Whatever can he want you for, Earle?” The doctor’s tale was soon told, and it was one which sent Charlie back to the school-room with a very different face to the one with which he had left it. A letter had come to Doctor West from Charlie’s father, and in it a note from his mother to Charlie himself, written the night before, and saying that a summons had come that very morning calling them to Charlie’s grandmother, who was very ill, and that they were starting for Scotland that night and would be almost at their journey’s end when Charlie got the news. The note said that Laura, Charlie’s sister, would go with them, but that they could not wait for Charlie himself, so they had written to Mrs. Lamb, Charlie’s old nurse, who lived about ten miles from Dr. West’s, and had asked her to take charge of him for a day or two, till more was known of his grandmother’s state and some better plan could be made for him. It was sad enough for Charlie to hear of the illness of his kind old grandmother – sad enough to see the merry start of the other boys, while he had to stay behind; but to have to think of Christmas day spent away from father and mother, away from Laura and home, was excuse enough for a few bitter tears. But unpleasant things come to an end as well as pleasant ones, and Charlie’s lonely waiting in the school-room came to its end, and he found himself that afternoon snugly packed into the Blackridge coach, and forgetting his own troubles in listening to the cheery chatter of the other passengers, and in looking at what was to be seen as the coach rolled briskly along the snow-covered road. It was quite dark when they reached Blackridge, and Charlie looked out at the people gathered round the door of the “Packhorse Inn,” and a sudden fear filled his mind lest there should be no one there to meet him; but he soon saw by the light at the inn door Nurse Lamb herself, with her kind face looking so beaming that it seemed a little bit like really going home.