Why the monkey's bum is red? II

“My dear Mistress,” he addressed the wife of Gold Twig's master. “Would you please spare something for me to eat?” Gold Twig recognized the voice. He was the beggar who ate her rice cake.

“Nothing for you!” the mistress of the house shouted. “Shoo!”

“Just anything, please,” the beggar begged. “Please have pity on this poor, old beggar.”

“You make me sick! Get out this minute!”

The next thing Gold Twig heard was the door slamming shut. She then trotted out of the kitchen and found the beggar sprawled on the ground before the storefront. She helped him up, ran back to the kitchen, and rushed back to the beggar with some leftovers from the noon meal of her master's family. He thanked her and waddled away with the food.

A few days later, Gold Twig's mistress told her to go to a nearby stream to catch shrimps. “Be sure your creel is full before you come back,” the mistress said.

Gold Twig made the bait. It's not difficult. All she had to do was to knead steamed rice leftovers into small dumplings together with roasted rice bran. The bran roasted yellow smelt nice enough to lure shrimps into her net. The net had a very small hollow bamboo stem sewn up in its center. Two thin bamboo sticks were crossed to anchor its four corners and a cord was tied to where the sticks crossed. A buoy was tied to the other end of the cord to make a shrimp net, which with the bait attached, could be submerged in a bend of the nearby stream. She would have to wait a while before using a strong bamboo stick with a hook attached to one of its ends to hook the buoy and lift the net to which it was tied.

The little housemaid, equipped with her net and bait, went to the stream early in the morning. She sank her net hundreds of times to the bottom of the shallow stream that flowed so gently as to make anyone think its water was not moving at all. But the net was empty each time she lifted it up. Hard as she might try, she caught no shrimp, and the sun began to set. She was worried and afraid. She remembered her mistress cautioned her not to return home without her creel full of shrimps. She was so agitated and agonized that she did not notice someone came next to her. “Hello, my dear little girl, what are you doing here?”

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