“Please, please, Tortoise, Mr. Tortoise, There is in all the world no one So slow-footed as you; Why are you so slow?” “What do you say, Mr. Hare? Then, I will race with you and see Which will be the first to reach The foot of yonder hill.” “However the Tortoise may hurry, He will take at any rate till night; And here I will take a nap.” Snore, snore, snore, snore, snore, snore, snore. “I have slept too long; I have blundered.” Leap, leap, leap, leap, leap, leap, leap. “You are too late, Mr. Hare; Where is your boast of a while ago?” Finally, there is a verse of two pentasyllables with a heptasyllable between, which is more popular among men than any other form. The _haiku_, as it is called, can hardly be given the name of poetry. It is simply a suggestion of ideas which it is left to the hearer to clothe with poetical sentiment; but the suggestion itself is far from explicit and needs a person used to this form of verse to interpret it in the sense intended. It is, in short, little more than a _tour de force_ in the art of compression. For instance: _Furuike ya_ _Kawazu tobikomu_ _Mizu no oto._ An old pond A frog jumping in The sound of water. It pictures the loneliness of an old pond, around which all is so still that the jumping of a frog into the water may be heard. The composition of Chinese poems by Japanese is one of the most artificial processes of poetising. Chinese characters are divided according to their intonation into those of even and oblique sounds, that is, characters which are pronounced straight and evenly and those in the pronunciation of which the voice changes in tone. A Chinese poem is composed in various combinations of these two kinds of characters, and certain lines in a verse have to rhyme. Now, the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters makes no distinction in their intonation; they are all pronounced in the same tone, Hence, whereas a Chinese can tell at once by its pronunciation whether a character has an even or an oblique sound, a Japanese must learn by heart the tone-quality of every character if he wishes to compose Chinese poems; the knowledge of this tone-quality is of no use to a Japanese for other purposes. Moreover, the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters differs entirely from the Chinese; it is believed to be a corruption of the Chinese pronunciation in ancient times. The normal grammatical order in a Chinese sentence is that the verb precedes the object, whereas in Japanese the object usually precedes the verb; the result is that in reading a Chinese poem in Japanese the rhyming words do not always end the lines. As the Japanese simply composes according to rule, his lines are sometimes unrecitable in Chinese. Now, to show the difference between the Chinese and Japanese manner of reading a Chinese poem, we will first give a poem in the original Chinese.