Lü Deqing kept a green-furred turtle in a basin pond at home; in time it grew very tame. Every day at noon, if he struck the water surface with a small bamboo rod, it would come out at the sound, and he would impale a few small slices of raw pork on the rod-tip and feed it; when it had eaten its fill it would go back in. So it went for two whole years without fail.
A child, wanting to play, struck the water at that time and brought it out and put it in a fixed basin, returning it the next day; at noon it would not come out, and after six or seven days, when a boy plunged his arm in to search, it was dead. That a tiny creature, slight as an insect, should resent a broken trust and rather starve than eat — strange indeed!
Then too: Lu Zili reared a white turtle in the dendrobium by his study; it was only as big as a small coin, its shell-pattern all golden-yellow with a lustre, its two eyes like lacquer; later, because he fed it shrimp paste, the golden pattern flaked off and it died.
At a temple fair in Xiuzhou a man had a turtle like a medicine-gourd; asked about it, he said that from the time he got it he had bound its belly and back with iron hoops, and that was why it was so. And a Daoist reared two turtles in a basin who went about begging; they were shaped like soft-shelled turtles but with turtle markings, their beaks like a parrot’s, their tails as long as their bodies, their scales mottled.
These four were all different from the ordinary.
