Now suppose that I do not know the meaning of "tells his tale." [I recollect perfectly that as a boy I thought it meant "whispered the old story into the ear of a shepherdess."] I determine to hunt it up in the Concordance. First of all, I find out from the Dictionary, if I do not know, to what Tone _tale_, always the last word of the phrase, belongs. Under that tone will be found various groups of words, each with a key-word which is called the Rhyme, that is to say, a key-word with which all the words in this group rhyme. There are only 106 of these key-words all together distributed over the Tones, and every word in the Chinese language must rhyme with one of them. The question of rhyme in Chinese is a curious one, and before going any farther it may be as well to try to clear it up a little. All Chinese poetry is in rhyme; there is no such thing as blank verse. The _Odes_, collected and edited by Confucius, provide the standard of rhyme. Any words which are found to rhyme there may be used as rhymes anywhere else, and no others. The result is, that the number of rhyme-groups is restricted to 106; and not only that, but of course words which rhymed to the ear five hundred years B.C. do so no longer in 1902. Yet such are the only authorised rhymes to be used in poetry, and any attempt to ignore the rule would insure disastrous failure at the public examinations. This point may to some extent be illustrated in English. The first two lines of the _Canterbury Tales_, which I will take to represent the _Odes_, run thus in modern speech:— "When that Aprilis with his showers sweet, The drought of March hath pierced to the root." No one nowadays rhymes _sweet_ with _root_. Neither did Chaucer; the two words, _sote_ and _rote_, were in his days perfect rhymes. But if we were Chinese, we should now rhyme _sweet_ with _root_, because, so to speak, Chaucer did so.