ever
see a big brother do any thing like that? Then Percy went out and
slammed the door, and left little May thinking very hard, and the baby
asleep, after all that noise. What was May thinking about? She had
heard mamma talk a great deal about China, and had seen queer pictures
of people with bald heads and a long braid of hair hanging down
behind, and in the cabinet in the sitting-room was a pair of tiny pink
satin slippers, so small that her little hand could just go into one
of them. Then she had a Chinese doll with almost a bald head, and the
queerest shaped eyes; and that was why she and Percy wanted this baby
to wake up that they might see what she looked like. That very morning
while the children were visiting their grandmother, a carriage came to
their house, bringing a little baby and its mother; and by the time
they got home, the child was in May's crib, fast asleep, and the two
mothers were talking together as they had not done for years before.
Baby Elsie was not easily wakened, for she never had a very quiet
place to sleep in. She was quite used to strange noises on shipboard,
creaking ropes and escaping steam, loud voices giving orders to
sailors, sometimes roaring waters and stormy winds. She had been many
nights in a railroad sleeping-car, and she was not disturbed by the
rush of wheels, or the whistling of the locomotive. Before that, she
lived part of her little life on a boat in a narrow river, and a few
months in a crowded, noisy house. Does it seem as if she had been
quite a traveler? She had just come all the way from China--a land on
the other side of the round world--and that was the reason that May
called her a Chinese baby. Percy and May had never seen Elsie's
mother, although she was their own aunt, for she and her husband had
been more than ten years missionaries in China, and had come on a
visit to America. Don't you think the two mothers, dear sisters, who
had been so long and so far apart, had a great deal to say to each
other? Do you expect they wanted Elsie to sleep quite as much as her
cousins wanted her to wake? She was a good child, but she knew how to
cry, and after a few days Percy said,--"She's not so much after all,
she can't talk and tell us anything, and when she cries, she boo-hoo's
just as you do, May."

In a week, two more Chinese travelers came; the baby's father, and
another cousin, Knox, a boy nine years old. Did you ever fire off a
whole pack of Chinese fire-crackers at