"Lots of them," he answered.

"Lots of them" is a favorite expression with the Chinese.

"Tell me some."

"Did you ever hear this one?"

"Fire-fly, fire-fly,
Come from the hill,
Your father and mother
Are waiting here still.
They've brought you some sugar,
Some candy, and meat,
For baby to eat."


I at once dismounted and wrote it down, and promised
him five hundred cash apiece for every new one he could
give me. In this way, going to and from the city, in
conversation with old nurses or servants, personal friends,
teachers, parents or children, or foreign children who had
been born in China and had learned rhymes from their
nurses, I continued to gather them during the entire
vacation, and when autumn came I had more than fifty of the
most common and consequently the best rhymes known
in and about Peking.

A few months after I returned to the city a circular was
sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese