After a long interval one of them approached him, and a little timidly offered him a piece of flour-cake. Little Wang took it without a word of thanks and bolted it down like a savage young thing, resuming his playing as soon as he had finished.—Then another, not to be outdone, gave him a little from his little bowl of congee, and squatting down beside him tried to talk to him in small baby words. The women and the old man drifted away, but all the children remained and were joined by others, who imitated what the newcomer was doing. Little Wang was making a regular pattern on the ground with his stones, working out a design from something he had once seen and not forgotten, so absorbed that he paid no attention to anything else.
The others continued to imitate him—disputing who should have the place next to him. Little Wang, by reason of that mysterious quality which sets one man over others, was already beginning to assert his leadership which he soon made legendary in the neighbourhood.
CHAPTER III
Within three days his father had set up a forge inside this rude hut at the city gate and had commenced turning out quantities of coarse iron nails for the cart trade. The clang of his hammer sounded far into the night, and the child fell asleep to that jarring music just as he often awoke to it. The steady pant of the bellows—worked by a small boy who was paid three farthings a day for his labour—and the glowing heat of the charcoal, were as much part of his life as the sparrows chirping on the waste outside the door. Very early he understood the trick of picking up live embers in his fingers as his father often did: if you are quick that is as easily done as putting your hand into ice-cold water.
There was food in plenty, too; the boy could eat all day long, and he grew stronger and bigger almost visibly. Not only was there food at home; there was plenty to be picked up along every foot of the stretch of highway leading to the frowning battlements of the city. No one would begrudge a child a bite when he announced as calmly as little Wang always did that he was hungry.
Soon he became friends with fifty men who gained their living by peddling cakes to the tide of traffic which endlessly swept in and out of the capital. When their baskets were sold out, it was always he whom they allowed to pick up the morsels from the bottoms until every crumb was gone. His quickness and his wisdom, in spite of his baby ways, delighted a people who see truth in common-sense.
Sometimes, too, he found money—those holed coins of infinitesimal value which the people used. He early discovered that if he searched carefully just beside the roadway, sooner or later coins which had been dropped by country bumpkins, coming out of the city the worse for their holiday-making, would be brought to light. He soon evolved a system of his own for working over the rutted roadway as a miner pans the gravel of a gold-bearing stream; and whenever he made a find his joy and excitement were amazing.
Each day and each month taught him something new. The other children of the city gate were filled with open admiration for everything he did: he learnt so fast every lesson from the great Book of Life spread before his eyes that he grew apace in wisdom. Always attentive and observant, nothing escaped him.
Especially remarkable was his power over animals. All living things seemed to claim relationship with him, and he never abused these ties. Before he was seven he knew how to catch rats with his bare hands, and how to approach vicious camels, who if you are not careful can display a savagery terrifying to all but their drivers. As for birds he had the strange power of talking to them until their fears were gone. Then, as warily as a cat he would pounce on them, catching fledgelings as easily as a man with a line will catch fish.