He was dreadfully humiliated, and asked me to help him get rid of them.
I carefully stripped off those on his back, but he begged me to leave some pieces on rather than scrape them off with my penknife. So from this time Fiam wore a garment as gay as a clown’s. All over him you could recognize little pieces of the face of the Emperor whose likeness is on all Japanese stamps.
Fiam was very proud of this costume on account of those fragments of the Imperial face.
“With this protection,” he said, “I can accomplish wonders.”
“Look out,” I told him. “Your suit has cost me more than twenty cents. What if I should wipe your coat off and put on a Chinese stamp to punish you?”
At this he was very angry. And when he was angry he had a queer way of getting even with me. He would say:
“All that I told you to write is false, absurd and stupid; it is exactly opposite to the pure and simple truth.” After that he wouldn’t speak for two hours. You can see that he was really dreadfully provoked.
