ONE:"Oh, Dick!" she whispered; but before I could rally from the blissful shock of it to reply, her face changed distressfully, and pointing beyond me, she drank a great breath, and cried, "Look!"
TWO: "We learned how it is that they get up this old ware; at least, we were told so by a man who claims to know. 'Boil the bronzes in strong vinegar,' he says, 'for several hours; and if you want to make them look very old, you must put some acid in the vinegar. You want the strongest vinegar that can be found, and the bronze must be cleaned of all grease before it is boiled.
THREE:Indeed? I wonder if you would let her come over here one day. I should like to show her my books with her book-plate in them. Saturday, perhaps, if that is a half-holiday. Would she come to lunch, do you think, and spend the afternoon?"It would amuse you if you could see the interest that the Japanese take in flying kites. And the funny part of it is that it is the men who do the most of the kite-flying, while the children look on, which is the exact reverse of what we do in our country. They have the funniest kinds of kites, and show a great deal of ingenuity in getting them up. Everybody has them, and they are so cheap that even the beggars can have kites to fly. They are of all sizes and shapes; you can buy a plain kite a few inches square, or you can get one as large as the side of a house, and covered all over with dragons and other things that sometimes cost a neat little sum for the painting alone. The Japanese understand the trick of flying a kite without a tail, and they do it by the arrangement of the strings, which is quite different from ours. On the other hand, some of their kites will have a whole line of strings hanging down as ornaments, and sometimes it looks as if the kite were anchored by means of these extra cords. They make their kites so large that three or four men are needed to hold some of them; and there is a story that a man who one day tied the cord of a kite to his waist was taken up in the air and never heard of[Pg 264] again. And there is another story of a man in the country who had a kite that he harnessed to a plough, and when the wind was good he used to plough his fields by means of it. But the story does not explain how he turned the furrow when he reached the end of the field. Perhaps he had an accommodating wind that shifted at the right time.
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