themselves, and more particularly of esteeming themselves ever so much smarter than their employers, leads to various small mishaps. While we are penning these pages, an instance occurs, which may be quoted because typical of a thousand. A friend staying with us in the country (we will call him Smith Senior for short) had sent a registered letter to his son, Smith Junior, in Tōkyō. Does the postman deliver it? Not he:—he does nothing so commonplace. Instead of delivering it, he unfolds his great mind and thinks. He remembers that various letters for Smith Senior have recently passed through his hands re-directed to the country:—ergo this particular letter must be re-directed to the country, and so to Smith Senior it returns after many days. The consequence is that Smith Junior is kept waiting for his monthly allowance, probably in no very filial frame of mind. This sort of thing it is that has given rise to a bitter remark current among the foreign residents. "The Japanese," they aver, "never think; and when they do, they think wrong."
Polo. The game of polo, which is believed by the best European authorities to have originated in Persia, was introduced into Japan from China in the sixth or seventh century after Christ. It is known here by the Chinese name of da-kyū 打毬 literally, "striking balls." A Japanese poet of the early part of the eighth century mentions polo as being then a favourite pastime at Court. It still remains essentially aristocratic, as a game played on horseback and entailing considerable apparatus and expense can scarcely fail to do.
The Japanese polo club, or rather racket, weighs a trifle under 2 ounces. It has a tapering bamboo handle some 3 ft. 6 in. in length, and of about ½ in. diameter at the thick end. To the thin end is spliced, with silk or cotton cord, a flat piece of split bamboo ½ in. in width, bent round so as almost to form a frame, and kept in position by a piece of double cord fastened from its extremity to the handle just above the splicing. Across this frame a light net of silk or cotton cord is stretched sufficiently
