3
“There is something strange about this,” thought I, and began to creep slowly, when I felt a pricking pain in my paws. Out of the straw that received me at my birth, I had been cast away into a thicket of bamboo grass!
I toiled through the thicket as far as a big pond, which I saw in front of me. I sat down by it, and wondered what I had better do. But nothing bright came into my mind. After a while, the thought struck me that if I mewed that student might come again to get me. This experiment, however, was of no avail. In the meantime a smart breath of air rippled the pond, and the sun began to sink. I was feeling very hungry, and fain would cry, but my voice failed me. The only thing I could do was to go somewhere in search of something to eat. Thus resolved, I wormed my way along the left side ot the pond. It was indeed a trying expedition. But taking heart I steadily worked on until at last I came to a place where I fancied it smelled of man.
A gap in a bamboo fence caught my eye. Thinking it would help me, I crawled through it into a yard. How strangely the wheel of Fortune turns! Had it not been for this gap, I might have starved to death on the roadside. “Even a rest under the shade of the same tree
