ntil the poor old thing was almost
worn out and could scarcely walk or even stand on her little misshapen
feet. To be sure, he slept a great deal, or the amah would have been
obliged to hand him over to a younger woman. There was another boy in
the Legation, a little Scotchman, who was one year older than Nelly.
They played together very often. But Nelly did not like boys--only baby
boys, she said. Indeed, she often made Arthur Macdonald feel very lonely
and unhappy because she preferred to leave him and go off to play with a
Chinese girl of her own age, called Shiao Yi. Shiao in Chinese means
'little,' so we will call her Little Yi.

[1] English, Americans, French, and all other white people are
called foreigners in China.

Little Yi's feet had never been bound, because she was a Manchu child,
and the Manchu women do not bind their feet; so she could run and skip
about the compound almost as freely as Nelly. Almost, I say, not quite,
because Chinese children are not dressed for running about. Their shoes
are hard and clumsy, and in winter their clothes are so thickly wadded
that they look like little balls.

Then there were two little girls of eleven and twelve who lived at the
German Legation, and were called Bertha and Liza Wolf. It was very
strange for Nelly the first time these children came to see her. Mrs.
Grey was calling upon their mother, who told her that they had just
arrived from home with their governess. At once Mrs. Grey invited them
to come to tea the next day, and she did not think of asking if they
could speak English; neither did their mother, who spoke English
beautifully, remember that her children could not do so. When they
arrived, Nelly was alone with Chu Ma, her amah, and they all laughed a
great deal when they found that they could not understand one another.
Bertha Wolf had picked up the Chinese word 'pu,' which means 'not,' and
she kept repeating that and mixing it up with German. It sounded very
funny. Nelly showed them her dolls' house, and Liza made the dolls sit
down and stand up in a marvellous way by bending their legs and sticking
pins into them. When tea-time came the children had become fast friends
by means of nods, shakes of the head, and the Chinese word 'pu'; which
shows that little girls can get on very well together even when they
don't chatter all the time. Since then Nelly had been taken to the
German Legation twice a week to have German lessons from Fraulein,
Liza's and