However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may be, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so much as noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print. His birth, his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in type, perhaps as sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of his life. Mention of one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic privilege, confined to the world of English society. In democratic America, no doubt because all men there are supposed to be born free and equal, we ignore the first event, and mention only the last two episodes, about which our national astuteness asserts no such effacing equality. Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the biography of an average man, let us look at these three momentous occasions in the career of a Far Oriental. Chapter 2. Family. In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered into this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even accorded the distinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead only the much less special honor of a birth-year. Not that he begins his separate existence otherwise than is the custom of mortals generally, at a definite instant of time, but that very little subsequent notice is ever taken of the fact. On the contrary, from the moment he makes his appearance he is spoken of as a year old, and this same age he continues to be considered in most simple ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next calendar year. When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is credited with another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day is a common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary for his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and Korea. Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth up at least one year and possibly two older than one really is, it lies beyond our present purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident that woman has had no voice in the framing of such a chronology. One would hardly imagine that man had either, so astronomic is the system. A communistic age is however but an unavoidable detail of the general scheme whose most suggestive feature consists in the subordination of the actual birthday of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the community. For it is not so much the want of commemoration shown the subject as the character of the commemoration which is significant. Some slight notice is indeed paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their observance is quite secondary in importance to that of the great impersonal anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the fifth day of the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the coming of humanity into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French revolutionary calendar. The first of them is called the festival of girls, and