Finally he went out with a stick and asked, “Tsing-Ching, what are you doing here? Do you know this is school-time? Do you know that you were allowed only [[108]]to go out for a drink and not to stay here and play? You have done wrong.”
“Why, teacher, I told you that I wanted to be a fish,” said Tsing-Ching. “I do not want books or exercises. I am going to be a fish and I will not go to school. Mother said you teach everything; now teach me to be a fish.”
His teacher said, “How foolish you are, Tsing-Ching; you are a boy, a man. You can learn many things better than to be a fish. Come with me now.”
That night when Tsing-Ching was walking with his mother and nurse out by the water, he saw the summer moon shining in the lake.
“How strange, Ah-Ma, the moon is under the lake! See, it raises the lake and shakes it all the time. I want it. What kind of a white ball is it?”
Then his mother told him that the moon was in the sky, not in the lake, and she explained and showed him. And when he saw the moon in the sky, he said, “I know that it is not the moon in the lake, for it shakes. It is not quiet like that one in the sky. It is a silver ball, I know.”
He asked so many questions that his mother grew tired of answering and let him ask unnoticed. Then he wandered away a little distance and threw stones in the water. And the waters waved and the white ball [[109]]danced so prettily that he wanted it very much. He waded into the lake, deeper, deeper, until he fell down. He screamed and swallowed the water, and it took a long time to make him alive again, after his mother took him out of the lake.
When the neighbors heard about it, they said, “Foolish boy; not satisfied to do the things he can—he is always wanting things he can not have.”
Many people in this world are like Tsing-Ching. [[110]]