TWO: "The decline in Portuguese trade with China was accompanied with a corresponding decline in the language, but it left its impress upon the more recent pidgin English, which contains many Portuguese words. Pidgin English is a language by itself, with very little inflection either in noun, pronoun, or verb, and with a few words doing duty for many. The Chinese learn it readily, as they have no grammatical giants to wrestle with in mastering it, and the foreigners are quite ready to meet them on the road and adapt their phraseology to its requirements. The Chinese has only to commit to memory a few hundred words and know their meaning; the foreigner (if he be English-speaking) has less than a hundred foreign words to learn, together with the peculiar construction of phrases. The Chinese have printed vocabularies in which the foreign word and its meaning are set forth in Chinese characters, and thus they have no occasion to trouble themselves with the alphabet of the stranger. These books are specially intended for the use of compradores and servants in foreign employ, and are so small that they can be readily carried in the pocket."The kosatsu," continued Doctor Bronson, "is the sign-board where the official notices of the government are posted. You find these boards in all the cities, towns, and villages of Japan; there may be several in a city, but there is always one which has a higher character than the rest, and is known as the great kosatsu. The one you are now looking at is the most celebrated in the empire, as it stands near the Nihon Bashi, whence all roads are measured, as I have already explained to you."