ONE:"In a little while after we went in, the performance began. A boy came into the ring from a room at one side of the tent, and he walked as if he were playing the king, or some other great personage. When he got to the middle of the ring, he opened a fan he carried in his right hand. He opened it with a quick jerk, as though he were going to shake it to pieces; and after he had opened it he announced the names of the wrestlers who were to come into the first act. If I hadn't been told what he was doing, I should have thought he was playing something from Shakspeare, he made such a fuss about it. Then he went out and the wrestlers came in, with a big fellow that Fred said must be the boss wrestler. He looked like an elephant, he was so big."No, I think you said it;--sounds like you."
TWO:There is a story current in Japan of a gentleman from Cincinnati who arrived one evening in Yokohama, and the following morning went into the country for a stroll. Everywhere the men, women, and children greeted him with the customary salutation, "Ohio, ohio," and the word rang in his ears till he returned to his hotel.Alice looked almost shocked at the notion of such unhallowed feet being thrust into these hardly less than sacred embroideries: it was as if her mother had suggested making a skirt out of the parrots and pomegranates that adorned the smart altar-cloth. But she divined that, in spite of her fathers inexplicable want of reverence for the Master (they had become Master and Helper, and sometimes she called him sir, much as Norah had called her father, but for antipodal reasons), there lurked behind his rather unseemly jokes a kindly intention towards herself. He might laugh at her, but somehow below that she felt (and she knew not how) that a part of him understood, and did not laugh. It was as if he knew what it meant to be in love, to thirst and to be unslaked, to be hungry and not to be fed.
