“We will honor Ng Chew as long as he lives,” they said. “When his birthday comes we will all fly kites.”
This they did. Each year, on the birthday of Ng Chew, they left the rice fields and spent the day flying kites.
The word spread beyond the little valley and from province to province, until all over the land kite flying marked the birthday of the sage of Kwang Tung. The wise man died and centuries passed, but still the Chinese keep Kite Day, honoring him who in the long ago led his people to safety in the mountains.
THE STORY OF A STONE
By David Starr Jordan
(Science)
Once on a time, a great many years ago, so many, many years that one grows very tired in trying to think how long ago it was; in those old days when the great Northwest consisted of a few ragged and treeless hills, full of copper and quartz, bordered by a dreary waste of sand flats, over which the Gulf of Mexico rolled its warm and turbid waters as far north as Escanaba and Eau Claire; in the days when Marquette Harbor opened out towards Baffin’s Bay, and the Northern Ocean washed the crest of Mount Washington and wrote its name upon the Pictured Rocks; when the tide of the Pacific, hemmed in by no snow-capped Sierras, came rushing through the Golden Gate between the Ozarks and the north peninsula of Michigan, and swept over Plymouth Rock and surged up against Bunker Hill; in the days when it would have been fun to study geography, for there were no capitals, nor any products, and all the towns were seaports—in fact, an immensely long time ago there lived somewhere in the northeastern part of the state of Wisconsin, not far from the city of Oconto, a little jellyfish. It was a curious little fellow, about the shape of half an apple, and the size of a pin’s head; and it floated around in the water, and ate little things, and opened and shut its umbrella pretty much as the jellyfishes do now on a sunny day off Nahant Beach when the tide is coming in. It had a great many little feelers that hung down all around like so many little snakes; so it was named Medusa, after a queer woman who lived a long while ago, when all sorts of stories were true. She wore snakes instead of hair, and used to turn people into stone images if they dared to make faces at her. So this little Medusa floated around, and opened and shut her umbrella for a good while,—a month or two, perhaps; we don’t know how long. Then one morning, down among the seaweeds, she laid a whole lot of tiny eggs, transparent as crab-apple jelly, and smaller than the dewdrop on the end of a pine leaf. That was the last thing she did; then she died, and our story henceforth concerns only one of those little eggs.
One day the sun shone down into the water—the same sun that shines over the Oconto sawmills now—and touched these eggs with life; and a little fellow whom we will call Favosites, because that was his name, woke up inside the egg, and came out into the world. He was only a little piece of floating jelly, shaped like a cartridge pointed at both ends, or like a grain of barley, although very much smaller. He had a great number of little paddles on his sides. These kept flapping all the time, so that he was constantly in motion. And at night all these little paddles shone with a rich green light, to show him the way through the water. It would have done you good to see them some night when all the little fellows had their lamps burning at once, and every wave as it rose and fell was all aglow with Nature’s fireworks, which do not burn the fingers and leave no smell of sulphur.
So the little Favosites kept scudding along in the water, dodging from one side to the other to avoid the ugly creatures that tried to eat him. There were crabs and clams of a fashion neither you nor I shall ever see alive. There were huge animals with great eyes, savage jaws like the beak of a snapping turtle and surrounded by long feelers. They sat in the end of a long, round shell, shaped like a length of stove pipe, and glowered like an owl in a hollow log; and there were smaller ones that looked like lobsters in a dinner horn. But none of these caught the little fellow, else I should not have had this story to tell.
At last, having paddled about long enough, Favosites thought of settling in life. So he looked around till he found a flat bit of shell that just suited him. Then he sat down upon it and grew fast, like old Holger Danske in the Danish myth, or Frederick Barbarossa in the German one. He did not go to sleep, however, but proceeded to make himself a home. He had no head, but between his shoulders he made an opening which would serve him for mouth and stomach. Then he put a whole row of feelers out, and commenced catching little worms and floating eggs and bits of jelly and bits of lime,—everything he could get,—and cramming them into his mouth. He had a great many curious ways, but the funniest of them all was what he did with the bits of lime. He kept taking them in, and tried to wall himself up inside with them, as a person would “stone a well,” or as though a man should swallow pebbles and stow them away in his feet and all around under the skin, till he had filled himself all full with them, as the man filled Jim Smiley’s frog.