“I don’t know exactly; perhaps the weather has been unfavorable.”
“Would you believe that I paid six piastres for a fish, which I could have purchased the day before for one.”
“And I, alas! gave seven.”
The rest of the dialogue was of a similar nature.
Before we left Constantinople we had every reason to believe that our interpreter had given us a literal translation, although it astonished us at the time.
Wonderful Sagacity.—One day last week, when the crowd of fashionables was greatest at the Union street exhibition, a beautiful girl, who had fed the elephant with sundry cakes and apples, in taking an apple from her bag drew out her ivory card case, which fell unobserved in the saw-dust of the ring. At the close of the ring-performances, the crowd opened to let the elephant pass to his recess, but instead of proceeding, as usual, he turned aside and thrust his trunk in the midst of a group of ladies and gentlemen, who, as might be expected, were so much alarmed that they scattered in every direction. The keeper at this moment discovered that the animal had something in his trunk. Upon examination he found it to be the young lady’s card case, which the elephant had picked up, and was only seeking out the fair owner.—N.Y. paper.
Tsze Pun Yu!
This is the title of a Chinese collection of tales, romances, fables, &c., a kind of publication in which Chinese literature abounds. In the work mentioned above, there are no less than seven hundred tales, the titles of some of them being, “Ghost of a Fortune Teller,” “A Stolen Thunderbolt,” “The Literary Fox advising Men to become Fairies,” “Elves begging Fish,” “The Man with three Heads,” “The Devil turned Matchmaker,” “A Pig acting the Priest of Taou,” “The Enchanted Tower,” “The Ass of a Mohamedan Lady,” “A Demon bearing Children,” “Vulcan’s Toys,” &c.
The following are translations from this work, made by a youth at Canton, who was studying the Chinese language: they will afford a specimen of a Chinese book of “Small Talk.”