ration of life, too, has increased, and is still on the increase,
since their discovery of the invigorating and medicinal properties of
vril, applied for remedial purposes. They have few professional and
regular practitioners of medicine, and these are chiefly Gy-ei, who,
especially if widowed and childless, find great delight in the healing
art, and even undertake surgical operations in those cases required by
accident, or, more rarely, by disease.

They have their diversions and entertainments, and, during the Easy
Time of their day, they are wont to assemble in great numbers for those
winged sports in the air which I have already described. They have also
public halls for music, and even theatres, at which are performed
pieces that appeared to me somewhat to resemble the plays of the
Chinese--dramas that are thrown back into distant times for their events
and personages, in which all classic unities are outrageously violated,
and the hero, in once scene a child, in the next is an old man, and so
forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their stories
cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull, on the whole,
but were relieved by startling mechanical contrivances, and a kind of
farcical broad humour, and detached passages of great vigour and power
expressed in language highly poetical, but somewhat overcharged with
metaphor and trope. In fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays
of Shakespeare seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or perhaps
to an Englishman in the reign of Charles II.

The audience, of which the Gy-ei constituted the chief portion, appeared
to enjoy greatly the representation of these dramas, which, for so
sedate and majestic a race of females, surprised me, till I observed
that all the performers were under the age of adolescence, and
conjectured truly that the mothers and sisters came to please their
children and brothers.

I have said that these dramas are of great antiquity. No new plays,
indeed no imaginative works sufficiently important to survive their
immediate day, appear to have been composed for several generations. In
fact, though there is no lack of new publications, and they have even
what may be called newspapers, these are chiefly devoted to mechanical
science, reports of new inventions, announcements respecting various
details of business--in short, to practical matters. Sometimes a child
writes a little tale of adventure, or a young Gy vents h