with her through life. In conversation with the
granddaughters of a duke and their old nurse, I discovered
that the same games the little children play upon the street,
they play in the seclusion of their green-tiled palace, and the
same nursery songs that entice Morpheus to share the mat
shed of the beggar's boy, entice him also to share the silken
couch of the emperor in the palace.

When a boy is old enough, he grows a queue, which takes
the place in the life of the Chinese boy which his first pair of
trousers does in that of the American or English boy. It is
one of the first things he lives for; and he should not be
despised for wearing his hair in this fashion, especially when
we remember that George Washington and Lafayette and
their contemporaries wore their hair in a braid down their
backs.

Besides the queue has a great variety of uses. It serves
him in some of the games he plays. When I saw the boys
in geometry use their queues to strike an arc or draw a circle,
it reminded me of my college days when I had forgotten to
take a string to class. The laborer spreads a handkerchief
or towel over his head, wraps his queue around it and
makes for himself a hat. The cart driver whips his mule
with it; the beggar uses it to scare away the dogs; the
father takes hold of his little boy's queue instead of his hand
when walking with him on the street, or the child follows
holding to his father's queue, and the boys use it as reins
when they play horse. I saw this amusingly illustrated on
the streets of Peking. Two boys were playing horse.