tone away from the horn. I had to make her sing four of them twice. I regretted this, as four cylinders were thereby wasted, and I can not replace these specially made cylinders on this side the Pacific. I began to see that the twenty-two hundred I have brought with me will be used up pretty rapidly when my investigation gets under full headway on the farther side of the Yellow Sea.     

       I have, later to-night, played over these seven records here in my room at the hotel, with some sense of disappointment. One of them I think will prove, on careful analysis, to have for its basis the ancient pentatonic scale. The intervals of two are very nearly those of the oldest known Greek scales of a tone and two conjunct tetra-chords. But in the case of the other four I shall be greatly surprised if they employ any other intervals than those of our own equal temperament scale of twelve semitones to the octave.     

       That, of course, is really the trouble with Japan as a field of research; these marvelous little people pick up and assimilate Western ideas with such rapidity that their ancient traditions become hopelessly confused.     

       The girl seemed to tire after a while. Her voice became hoarse and she fell to coughing. I realized then that I had been holding her pretty closely to this work, and told her that she could rest a little while.     

       At this, she sat on the edge of the European ted, and looked at me, half smiling.     

       “You lig hear the koto?” she asked suddenly.     

       I nodded eagerly. The koto, as I have long known, is closely related to the ancient Chinese instrument, the ch'in, beloved of Confucius. Many investigators hold, indeed, that it is the same instrument, transplanted in the earliest times and changed a little in its new environment.     

       She slipped out of the room, and shortly returned with the instrument, which remotely resembles a modern zither—at least, in the fact that it has a number of strings (thirteen in this instance) stretched over a board and played by plucking with the fingers. It was a beautiful object, the koto of this nameless little inmate of the Yoshiwara, highly lacquered, with fine inlays of polished woods, tortoise-shell, ivory, and silver; and I could see by her smiling 

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