The boy travellers in the Far East : adventures of two youths ... - Library

154
THE BOY TRAVELLERS.
SO solemn, and why tliey won't play as our cats do. I have tried to find
out how it all liappeTis, but nohody can tell. Doctor Bronsou says the kit-
tens are born without tails, and that is all he knows about it. I think they
must be a different kind of cat from ours ; but, apart froni the absence of
tails, they don't look any way dissimilar. Somebody says that an American
once took one of these tailless cats to San Francisco as a curiosity, and
that it would never make friends with any long-tailed cat. It would sjjit
and scratch, and try to bite off the other cat's tail ;
but one day, when they
put it with a cat whose tail had been cut oft' by a bad boy, it was friendly
at once."
Fred wanted over so much to send home a goldfish with a very wide
and beautiful tail. The fish didn't seem to be much unlike a common
goldfish, except in the tail, which was triple, and looked like a piece of
lace. As it swam around in the water, especially when the sun was shining
on the globe, its tail seemed to ha\e nearly as many colors as tlie rainbow,
and both the boys were of opinion that no more beautiful fish was ever
seen. But the proposal to send it to America was rather dampened by
the statement of the Doctor that the experiment had been tried several
times, and only succeeded in a very few instances. Almost all the fish
died on the voyage over the Pacific ;
and even when they lived through
that piart of the trip, the overland journey from San Francisco to the At-
lantic coast generally proved too much for tliem. The Japanese name for
this fish is kin-giyo, and a pair of tlieni may be bought for ten cents. It
is said that a thousand dollars were offered for the first one that ever
reached Kew York alive, which is a large advance on the price in Yoko-
hama.
The Japanese dogs were also objects of interest to our young friends,
though less so than the cats and the goldfish. They have several varieties
of dogs in Japan, some of them being cpiite without hair, wdiile others
have very thick coats. The latter are the most highly prized, and the
shorter their noses, the more valuable they are considered. Fred found a
dog, about the size of a King Charles spaniel, that had a nose only half an
inch long. He was boasting of bis discovery, when Frank pointed out
one that had less than a third of an inch. Then the two kept on the hunt
for the latest improvement in dogs, as Frank expressed it, and tliey finally
found one that had no nose at all. The nostrils were set direct!}' in the
end of the little fellow's liead, and his under-jaw was so short that the
operations of barking and eating were not very easy to perform. In spite
of tlie difficulty of barking, he made a great deal of noise when the boys
attempted to examine liim, and he gave Frank to understand in the most