At this season of the year particularly very many trials of speed are taking place, and often birds are on the way home a number of days, returning long after they have been given up.
Raising homing pigeons is a pursuit which all who are fond of pets must enjoy, and one which the boys would do well to engage in.
[BURIED TREASURES.]
In an old country like Japan, which has a history of two thousand years, there must be much treasure buried in the soil. There have been centuries of war, when people lived in continual danger of robbers or soldiers.
In those times money and other valuables were often secreted in the ground, out in the woods or meadows, or under the foundations of a house. The death of the owner would leave the spot unknown, to lie in obscurity forever, or to reward some accidental finder of the prize. In almost all the old settled parts of Japan every spot of ground has been built and burned, farmed and fought over, many times, and the discovery of hidden treasure is a common occurrence. The Japanese government has passed laws declaring that all such treasure belongs to the state. The honest finder is always, however, liberally rewarded.
While living in Japan, from 1870 to 1874, I heard of several cases of buried treasure coming to light. Some of them were old pieces of money, like bullets, or lumps of silver and gold of all shapes, and simply stamped in one place. The happy finder in the picture has struck upon a mass of the thin oval gold coins called obans, which are worth from ten to fifty dollars each in our money. Even his dog shares his glee, while behind him is his envious neighbor, who is vexed because he did not see the coins first.
There are many foolish persons in the United States who have spent great labor and wasted much time to find the pots of gold which Captain Kidd is said to have buried near the sea-shore. So in Japan: I met, while there, several foolish people, whose whole mind was set on getting suddenly rich by finding buried money. The amount of spade-work and field-digging which they accomplished without any success would have sufficed to have made good farmers of them. It is a surer thing in Japan, as in America, to seek to find gold by steady work and a mind on the lookout for opportunities than by digging for it at random.
The Chinese way of talking about a person who is "waiting for something to turn up" is "sitting beside a stump, on the watch for a hare." A farmer in ancient times was ploughing a rice field, when he saw a hare dash itself against a stump that stood in his field; and immediately fall dead. The foolish farmer, leaving his plough, sat down upon the stump and waited for another hare to come and do likewise, which no other hare was foolish enough to do.