"And if ever you saw felt shoes and pigtails flying in the air 'twas then," said Hy. "It looked for all the world like Old Faithful had spouted in a poll-parrot cage. I don't know why I done it, no more than the man in the moon--it was one of them idees that takes hold of you, and gets put through before you can more'n realise you're thinking of it--but it was the greatest success of its kind I ever see. We had a two-hundred-foot head of water and a six-inch stream, and I might say that there was a yaller haze of Chinamen in the atmosphere for the next ten seconds. I piped one Charley-boy right over the top of a tool-shed. Well, our boss was a mighty kind-hearted man, and when that crowd of spitting, foaming, gargling, gobbling Chinamen went to him, and begun to pour out their troubles like several packs of fire-crackers going off to oncet, waving all the arms and legs I hadn't knocked out of commission, he was het up considerable. He never waited to hear my side of the story, but just rolled up his pants and waded into me up to the hocks; he read me my pedigree from Adam's wife's sister down to now, and there wasn't a respectable person in it, according to him. "I didn't like it, and I made a swipe for him with a shovel, but he was too soople for me, and of all the lickings I ever got, that is the one I don't want to remember the most: he did a sort of double-shuffle fandango on my back, while he brought my legs into the argument with a sluice rake. "When he asked me if I had had enough, I told him I thought it would do for the present, because, as a matter of fact, if all I had more than enough was money in the bank, I wouldn't have done no more work for the rest of my days. "So then he calls me up and gives me my time, and I must say he treated me square when he said good-bye. "'You're the best darn man on a monitor lever that I ever did see,' says he, 'but anywheres else you're the foolest combine of small boy and dare-devil, and some other queer thing that I don't seem to be able to find a name for, that ever cumbered this earth. Now, get the ---- out of this, and good luck to you.' "I didn't feel a bit sorry for them Chinamen--they're only hairless monkeys that don't even know enough to wear their tails in the right place. Their arithmetic proves that. It's regular monkey figgering. They haven't any numbers that look like numbers at all. Suppose you want to multipy twenty-five by thirty-six, Chinee system? First you put down a rooster's foot-track; that's twenty-five. Underneath that goes the ground-plan of a small house; that's thirty-six. Then you take an hour off, and work out the sum with a lot of little balls on wires; then you put down the answer, and what do you think it is? Why, it's a map of Chicago after the fire! Shucks! And they call themselves men. I'd go old Job three boils to his one rather than have any Chinks around me.