--'True,' I said, 'I know a few instances. In Japan there is a kind of cloth, mostly used for négligées, called _Yukata_, a bath-cloth, so called because it was originally used after the bath. We call the "evening" _Yiukata_, the only difference being the "u" in one case being pronounced longer than in the other. We call "shower" _Yiudachi_. A European lady married to a Japanese appears to have tried to remember the bath-cloth by association. She went to a draper's and asked for a _Yiudachi_ (shower) in place of _Yiukata_ (evening). No one understood it. She was speaking of "shower" instead of "evening," the result of trying to speak by association. We have two ways of counting, and we call the number "ten" either _jiu_ or _to_. We have a certain kind of boxes which are made to fit one on top of the other, and only the topmost box has a lid. They are called _jiu-bako_, which means piling boxes. They are used in households very commonly. The same lady appears to have remembered that name by _jiu_, that is, ten of the number according to one of two ways, and _Hako_, a box. One day she called her servant to bring _to-bako_ instead of _jiu-bako_. The servants, of, course, did not understand her. The lady misused the association of counting ten in one way instead of the other.' --'You said you had no difference between _r_ and _l_, but I suppose you have almost all sounds of our tongue.' --'No,' I answered, 'we have not. We have, for instance, no sound of _f_ or _v_. In some parts of the country people pronounce _ha_, _hi_, _he_, _ho_ like _fa_, _fi_, _fe_, _fo_, but it is considered bad dialect. The want of _v_ and _f_ in our letters is a point of great difficulty in transcribing foreign words into our writing, but we employ a new method for doing so. On the other hand, our _h_ is pronounced very acutely. You say you have _h_ mute and _h_ aspirate, but in practice I never see, or rather hear, any aspiration at all. Hence, Count "Hisamatsu," our actual military attaché, is always called by the French, as he complains, "Isamatsu," which is not his Japanese name at all. This fact reminds me of a similar matter concerning our own Tokio. The genuine Tokio people generally pronounce _Hi_ as _shi_. It is curious, but it is a fact. This often causes comical mistakes to be made by servant-girls who are told by their mistresses to pronounce it correctly, for they often mix up and use _hi_ in place of _shi_ and _vice versa_. Mind! Tokio is the capital of Japan, but its language is not the purest of the Japanese language. The same holds good in London. It is rather strange for us to notice that in London the _h_ is so commonly misused. I once went to a master, or rather mistress, as she was a woman, of elocution, or at least she advertised herself as such, and she told me that one must be very careful not to be corrupted by the London patois, and that one must not say "am and hegg" for "ham and