ls are
not all in one, but joined together by a sort of gristle, which
enables them to move with greater ease and not so stiffly.

Directly any one hears the name of tortoise, he begins to think of
tortoise-shell. This ought really to be called turtle-shell, as it is
made from the shell of the hawk's-bill turtle. Tortoise-shell is made
by soaking the plates of the shell in warm water until they are soft;
then they are pressed into the shapes wanted in warm iron moulds, and
taken out and polished.

Some of the sea-turtles are very fierce; and although they have no
teeth, their jaws are so strong that they can bite a walking-stick in
half. Land-tortoises are quite harmless; they only attack the insects
they feed upon. They go to sleep, like the dormouse, in the winter,
but they do not make a burrow; they cover themselves with earth by
scraping it up and throwing it over their bodies. In doing this they
would find their heads and tails very much in the way if it were not
that they are able to draw them in between their shells. No one, of
course, knows how they find their way out again in the spring; but it
is supposed that they scratch the earth away and throw it underneath
them, at the same time pushing their way up.

Tortoises live to a very great age. One was given to the Zoological
Gardens in 1833 which had already lived seventy years in Port Louis,
in the island of Mauritius. Its shell, from the head to the tail,
measured four feet four inches and a half, and it weighed two hundred
and eighty-five pounds.

[Decoration]

[Illustration: {A Chinese man fishing with birds}]

THE IRON RING.

Chang Wang was a Chinaman, and was reputed to be one of the shrewdest
dealers in the Flowery Land. If making money fast be the test of
cleverness, there was not a merchant in the province of Kwang Tung who
had earned a better right to be called clever. Who owned so many
fields of the tea-plant, who shipped so many bales of its leaves to
the little island in the west, as did Chang Wang? It was whispered,
indeed, that many of the bales contained green tea made by chopping up
spoiled black tea leaves, and coloring them with copper--a process
likely to turn them into a mild kind of poison; but if the unwholesome
trash found purchasers, Chang Wang never troubled himself with the
thought whether any one might suffer in health from drinking his tea.
So long as the dealer made money, he was content; and plenty of money
he mad