This is a bit of Chinese ritual music. It is called the Guiding March, and is played by two _Sheng_, four other instruments also in pairs, two drums, and two pair of castanets. The music is played when the emperor, with the princes, dignitaries, and attendants, passes the second gate to enter the temple. The circles and dots at the side of several of the notes are signs that the drums and castanets are to sound. As you would not understand the march by the Chinese symbols, I have done it into English, and you have to read from the top of the right hand column, and then down each column beyond in succession—the gaps only indicate the holding on longer of the note preceding:— |go.|Do |co.|A |C. |a |d | | | |a | |ao |co |d. | | | |co.|go | |d |a | M | |Co |d |f. |d |co |co | A | |ao.|co |D |co |a |d | R | |C |a. |Co.|a | | | C | |Do.| |ao |co.|go | | H | |C |go | |d |f |d. | | |ao.|f. |d. |co.|D |co | The small letters are notes within the treble and the capitals for notes below it. Looks like a very early anticipation of tonic sol-fa. If you write this down on the treble stave you soon become proficient in Chinese scoring,—that is, provided you translate the Chinese characters correctly, and comprehend also the multitude of little signs used in addition, which to the native are easy of recognition. I take up a little book that I have of Japanese songs and open it, beginning at the end, which with them is the commencement, and it looks, as I scan the page, very much the same in fashion as the English columns which I have set up before you. The characters are printed in black, and the signs in vermilion, on a beautiful silkworm paper that glistens with silvery sheen like a cocoon, and has impressed lines separating each column of characters; and each page is as a double page without inner margins, six columns to a page. Strange to say, the little book, although it measures only six inches by two inches and five eighths, is quite six feet long, for it folds backwards and forwards after the fashion of the child’s Jacob’s ladder. And this is the little book that a little Japanese maiden will take out of her sleeve and therewith caress her thoughts with music, opening it to and fro as her fancy leads her, and perhaps finding there her song of songs, where hiddenly folding there, too, may be felt some flower token that she cherishes for remembrance, even as we treasure crushed pansies and violets. Be sure, the nature that we call human nature is much the same all the world over; in one land it is but a variant of that which it is in another. The love songs as usual come first in interest, and occupy a large share in the national music, both of Japan and China; but sentiment expends itself in many ways. One song is entitled the “Haunts of Pleasure,” it is an early composition and a still popular work, the theme of which is ever new in London as in Kyoto and Peking.