shoulders of his friend, who had risen also.
There they both stood, stretching themselves as high as they could, and
holding each other tightly, so that they might not fall down. The Kioto
frog turned his nose towards Osaka, and the Osaka frog turned his nose
towards Kioto; but the foolish things forgot that when they stood up
their great eyes lay in the backs of their heads, and that though their
noses might point to the places to which they wanted to go their eyes
beheld the places from which they had come.

'Dear me!' cried the Osaka frog, 'Kioto is exactly like Osaka. It is
certainly not worth such a long journey. I shall go home!'

'If I had had any idea that Osaka was only a copy of Kioto I should
never have travelled all this way,' exclaimed the frog from Kioto, and
as he spoke he took his hands from his friend's shoulders, and they both
fell down on the grass. Then they took a polite farewell of each other,
and set off for home again, and to the end of their lives they believed
that Osaka and Kioto, which are as different to look at as two towns can
be, were as like as two peas.

(Japanische Marchen.)

THE STORY OF A GAZELLE

Once upon a time there lived a man who wasted all his money, and grew
so poor that his only food was a few grains of corn, which he scratched
like a fowl from out of a dust-heap.

One day he was scratching as usual among a dust-heap in the street,
hoping to find something for breakfast, when his eye fell upon a small
silver coin, called an eighth, which he greedily snatched up. 'Now I can
have a proper meal,' he thought, and after drinking some water at a well
he lay down and slept so long that it was sunrise before he woke again.
Then he jumped up and returned to the dust-heap. 'For who knows,' he
said to himself, 'whether I may not have some good luck again.'

As he was walking down the road, he saw a man coming towards him,
carrying a cage made of twigs. 'Hi! you fellow!' called he, 'what have
you got inside there?'

'Gazelles,' replied the man.

'Bring them here, for I should like to see them.'

As he spoke, some men who were standing by began to laugh, saying to the
man with the cage: 'You had better take care how you bargain with him,
for he has nothing at all except what he picks up from a dust-heap, and
if he can't feed himself, will he be able to feed a gazelle?'

But the man with the cage made answer: 'Since I started from my home in
the country, fifty people at