st boy on the face
as hard as ever she could--and she can slap pretty hard, as Oswald knows
but too well--and she had taken the second-sized boy and was shaking him
before Dicky could get his left in on the eye of the slapped assailant
of the aged denizen of the Flowery East. The other three went for
Oswald, but three to one is nothing to one who has hopes of being a
pirate in his spare time when he grows up.

In an instant the five were on us. Dicky and I got in some good ones,
and though Oswald cannot approve of my sister being in a street fight,
he must own she was very quick and useful in pulling ears and twisting
arms and slapping and pinching. But she had quite forgotten how to hit
out from the shoulder like I have often shown her.

The battle raged, and Alice often turned the tide of it by a well-timed
shove or nip. The aged Eastern leaned against the wall, panting and
holding his blue heart with his yellow hand. Oswald had got a boy down,
and was kneeling on him, and Alice was trying to pull off two other boys
who had fallen on top of the fray, while Dicky was letting the fifth
have it, when there was a flash of blue and another Chinaman dashed into
the tournament. Fortunately this one was not old, and with a few
well-directed, if foreign looking, blows he finished the work so ably
begun by the brave Bastables, and next moment the five loathsome and
youthful aggressors were bolting down the passage. Oswald and Dicky were
trying to get their breath and find out exactly where they were hurt and
how much, and Alice had burst out crying and was howling as though she
would never stop. That is the worst of girls--they never can keep
anything up. Any brave act they may suddenly do, when for a moment they
forget that they have not the honour to be boys, is almost instantly
made into contemptibility by a sudden attack of crybabyishness. But I
will say no more: for she did strike the first blow, after all, and it
did turn out that the boys had scratched her wrist and kicked her shins.
These things make girls cry.

The venerable stranger from distant shores said a good deal to the other
in what I suppose was the language used in China. It all sounded like
"hung" and "li" and "chi," and then the other turned to us and said--

"Nicee lilly girlee, same piecee flowelee, you takee my head to walkee
on. This is alle samee my father first chop ancestor. Dirty white devils
makee him hurt. You come alongee fightee ploper. Me li