SEAS AND LANDS SEAS AND LANDS BY SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, M.A., K.C.I. E., C.S.I. AUTHOR OK "THK LIGHT OF ASIA," K.TC. KTC. WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS 1Rc\v Edition LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND XK\V VoRK: 15 FAST 16"' STREET 1894 All rights reserved r BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. First Edition, %vo, September 1891, Re- printed November 1891 ; Cheap Edition, crown 8vo, February 1892, Reprinted August 1892, Jaimary 1894; Colonial Edition, September 1892, Reprinted January 1894. TO M7 DAUGHTER, KATHARINE LILIAN ARNOLD, THE DEAR COMPANION OF MY WANDERINGS, Cbese ARK DEDICATED. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAOK I. IN MID-OCEAN , I II. THE GOLF OF ST. LAWRENCE 1 6 III. MONTREAL AND TORONTO 2 8 IV. NIAGARA ^l V. AMERICAN SOIL 58 VI. MEN AND CITIES 75 VII. BOSTON go Vm. HARVARD 103 IX. OCEAN TO OCEAN Il6 X. SAN FRANCISCO 133 XI. THE PACIFIC 149 XII. JAPAN . 166 Xnr. A JAPANESE CITY 191 XIV. RURAL, JAPAN 2o6 XV. TEMPLES AND SHRINES 228 XVI. POETRY AND PLAYS 242 XVII. A JAPANESE DINNER 260 XVIH. THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE .... 278 XIX. SAKE AND TEA 294 XX. AT HOME 315 XXI. NATURE AND ART 339 XXII. COURT AND COMMERCE . 357 XXIIL THE JAPANESK HEAUTH 375 XXIV. "KWAJl! KWAJl!" 391 XXV. DAILY LIFE 401 XXVI. MILITANT JAPAN 412 b x CONTENTS. CHAP. PAOK XXVII. JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS 424 xxvni. JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS (continued) . . . 434 XXIX. A JAPANESE EXHIBITION 447 XXX. THE JAPANESE SHAMPOOER 457 XXXI. A DAY IN FLOWERLAND 467 XXXIL A JAPANESE HEALTH RESORT 476 XXXIII. THE DAY OF THE DEAD IN JAPAN .... 486 XXXIV. A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY 493 XXXV. ASCENT OF FUJI-SAN 504 XXXVL IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS 522 XXXVII. EASTERN FORTITUDE 536 XXXVIII. AN AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO .... 547 XXXIX. THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT 558 XL. HOMEWARD BOUND 571 INDEX 593 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE OUR GARDEN AT AZABU . Frontitpiece WASHINGTON : THE CAPITOL . 59 WASHINGTON : THE WHITE HODSE 65 PHILADELPHIA : INDEPENDENCE HALL 79 SAN FRANCISCO .... 135 THE HATOBA AND GRAND HOTEL, YOKOHAMA .... 167 A GEISHA 172 A JAPANESE LADT . . . 173 A COUNTRY GIRL .... 176 THE BABY 179 FUJI-SAN 181 A MUSUME 183 THE ONE HUNDRED AND ONE STEPS 185 THK CASTLE MOAT, TOKIO . . 190 JAPANESE CHILDREN . . . 195 THE TOKIO CAB .... 202 RICE FIELDS 214 TEMPLES AT SHIBA . . . 221 THE RKD BRIDGE, NIKKO . . 229 DAN j i no THE ACTOR . . . 247 THESAMISEN .... 253 AT A PRIVATE DINNER . . . 262 WAITING MAIDS .... 267 FAOt DANCING GIRLS .... 269 AFTER THE BANQUET . . . 271 THE LOTUS OF BUDDHISM . . 291 BRINGING SAKE .... 295 TEA AND TOBACCO .... 305 TEA AND Music .... 309 LIGHT REFRESHMENT . . . 314 COOLIES 318 MY TEACHER 320 MY PUPIL 321 THE SISTERS 323 THE BATH-HOUSE .... 325 THE GARDENER'S WIFE . . . 327 A WOMAN SLKEPING . . . 329 WASHING 331 DANCING GIRL . . . . 335 JAPANESE VILLAGE . . . 338 MAT-MAKING 340 A TEMPLE GATB .... 356 ROAD TO ODAWARA . . .361 THE MUSUME ("AND ON HER HEAD," &o.) ... GIRL OF THE YOSHIWARA AT THE YOSHIWARA INN-SERVANTS Xll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. A JAPANESE LADY .... THE KAGO THE AUTHOR'S "HAN" THE DAILY "TUB" INVITATION TO THE EMPEROR'S EVENING PARTY AT NAGOYA . NAGOYA . . IN WINTER DRESS . A JAPANESE GARDEN . HAKONE LAKE PAOB GRAVE OF KO-MCRASAKI . . 489 JAPANESE COOLIES WEARING MINO 506 A COUNTRY WOMAN : FUEL AND FLOWERS .... 523 A BAMBOO GROVE . . .530 THE JINRIKISHA .... 546 INVITATION TO THE EMPEROR'S GARDEN PARTY . . . 550 CEYLON, COLOMB > . . . .585 SUEZ CANAL 589 The American views are reproduced by permission from Photographs by Messrs. Frith & Go. SEAS AND LANDS. CHAPTER I. IN MID OCEAN. SOUTH-WESTERLY squalls and blinding sheets of rain, relieved occasionally by gleams of pale, unwilling sunshine, were troubling the busy tide-way of the Mersey when we embarked, on Thursday, August 22, at Liverpool, for Quebec and Montreal. Those who take this very interesting route to the American Continent forego the swift passages made to New York by the great racing vessels which fly across in little over six days. On the other hand, the traject from land to land by the St. Lawrence line occupies only five days at least with anything like fair weather and at its termination there is, further, the delightful voyage up the great Canadian river, some 700 or 800 miles of quiet and picturesque navigation. True, also, upon this Canadian track, should the nights be dark, there is always some risk from icebergs in and about Belleisle Straits, and a certain amount of anxiety must haunt the captain, if, as is generally the case, fogs cover the Gulf of the St. 2 SEAS AND LANDS. Lawrence. But during the summer and early autumn months the attractions of the Dominion route are pre-eminent, and our good ship was full to the last berth with Transatlantic tourists returning from the Paris Exhibition, with homeward-bound Canadians, and emigrants. On a fine and well-found steamer these last- mentioned people no longer suffer as in the old bad days of sailing ships. Yet they still go through so much misery of all sorts that one marvels how some among them ever plucked up courage for the adventure. They come on board, crowded together in the steam tender, like the herds of red and black oxen which are seen crossing from Birkenhead to Liverpool, or vice versd, in those capacious cattle- boats with the bluff bows. Frightened women, tearful children, and moody men nobody would suppose them to be modern Pilgrim Fathers were starting to fill up the waste fields of a mighty empire, and to make, with luck and industry, their fortunes. Nobody cheers them with music or any sign of public approval and encouragement. They look as melancholy and uncared-for as the doomed cattle ; and might almost be going to as tragic a destiny. In ancient Greece the intending colonists marched down to the sea's edge with pipes and dances, the " Prytanis " going proudly first with the sacred fire from the municipal earth, girls bearing flowers and foliage, and boys portions of the paternal soil, while libations and offerings were joyously made to Deities of Land and Water. No painter or IN MID OCEAN. 3 poet could elicit any gay Greek colour or grace of hope and gladness out of these dejected and dis- jointed groups, unless it were from the Scandi- navian contingent, which seemed cleaner, brighter, and more composed than the Irish, Scotch, and English. These, especially the Celts, melt into pathetic hopeless grief when the hour of parting arrives ; and truly it was a sorrowful time for many among them when, heavily as the chill showers fell, there were more tears than rain-drops on their faces. One knew, besides, that there was so much coming for them to suffer upon the rough sea, and in the unaccustomed ship-life. The Mersey was all grey and white with wind-lashed waves as the anchor was got up and the crew hauled in the gangway away from the puffing, snorting steam tender. It looked, indeed, as if evil weather was brewing for us all outside the bar. War being at the moment raging between Admirals Tryon and Baird, the Cyclops and Gorgon, coast-defence ships, lay in the river guarding the seven wealthy miles of Liverpool docks from the arrogant invader, with the aid of a flotilla of torpedo-boats. Even these, however, were all moored high up the fairway, avoiding the stress of the wet and wild south- westerly gale outside. Yet it proved not nearly so bad at first for the emigrants as might have been expected. Down to Crosby Light the estuary was sufficiently protected, and, running out for the south end of the Isle of Man and towards the north passage between Ballycastle and the Mull of Cantyre, 4 SEAS AND LANDS. the wind softened a little, and the great steamer too heavy with coal and cargo to yield much to the short billows made no very formidable movements. Grievous, of course, was the havoc which sea-sick- ness, following upon sorrow, wrought even thus upon the poor emigrant families. Children were soon prostrate, mothers reduced to limp maternal help- lessness, and fathers sometimes not greatly better. But there were no waves breaking over the vessel to soak them to the skin they had all good shelter from cold and spray under the after-deck, and in the morning had gained a little respite from their first hard sea lesson, as we threaded a passage under the heights of Slieve Slaght and the basaltic crags of DunafF Head, entering Lough Swilly to pick up the Londonderry mails. " Green," truly, as any emerald, does Erin appear to one who passes up this northernmost inlet of the island, between Coleraine and Donegal. On the western side of the lough many pretty mansions and villas, all snow white, deck the verdant wood- lands and hanging meadows. Inland rise the Scalp Mountain and Mamore Pass on the left, and on the right the Knockalla Hills, and, far off and massive, the Glendowan and Derryveagh Ranges, overhang- ing Mulvoy Bay and Milford, where Lord Leitrim was murdered. The anchorage for mail steamers is far away from Londonderry, but Lough Swilly, which leads thither, naturally calls to mind the famous siege of the city in 1689, when the Irish army of King James, under Rosen and Hamilton, IN MID OCEAN. 5 beleaguered the place during more than one hundred days, but could not force the gallant Protestant garrison to succumb, although famine and pestilence were their close allies, and the traitorous Lundy, who was the Governor of the city, attempted to sell the gates. That post, as all have read, was taken out of his false hands by a renowned and valiant parson, the Kev. George Walker, Rector of Donaghmore, whose courage and piety preserved the faithful Derry. Up these waters proceeded to her rescue those stout merchantmen of Kirke's relieving fleet, the Phoenix and Mountjoy, which, filled with stores, broke through the chains and booms placed across the Foyle, and brought comparative abundance to Londonderry, and despondency, ending in despair, to the besieging forces. The blockade was thus triumphantly ended on July 30, 1689 ; and a volume in the ship's library supplies to hand the eloquent passage in which Macaulay writes of the famous siege and fortunate relief. " Five generations," says his History of England, " have passed away, and still the wall of Londonderry is to the Protestants of Ulster what the trophy of Marathon was to the Athenians. A lofty pillar, rising from a bastion which bore during many weeks the heaviest fire of the enemy, is seen far up and down the Foyle. On the summit is the statue of Walker, such as when, in the last and most terrible emergency, his elo- quence roused the fainting courage of his brethren. In one hand he grasps a Bible ; the other, pointing down the river, seems to direct the eyes of his 6 SEAS AND LANDS. famished audience to the English topmasts in the distant bay. Such a monument was well deserved ; yet it was scarcely needed ; for, in truth, the whole city is to this day a monument of the great deliver- ance. The wall is carefully preserved., nor would any plea of health or convenience be held by the inhabitants sufficient to justify the demolition of that sacred enclosure which, in the evil time, gave shelter to their race and their religion." o "The summit of the ramparts forms'a pleasant walk. The bastions have been turned into little gardens. Here and there among the shrubs and flowers may be seen the old culverins which scattered bricks cased with lead among the Irish ranks. One antique gun, the gift of the Fishmongers of London, was dis- tinguished during the 105 memorable days by the loudness of its report, and still bears the name of 'Roaring Meg.' The cathedral is filled with relics and trophies. In the vestibule is a huge shell one of many hundreds which were thrown into the city. Over the altar are still seen the French flagstaves taken by the garrison in a desperate sally ; the white ensigns of the House of Bourbon have long been dust, but their place has been supplied by new banners, the work of the fairest hands of Ulster. The anniversary of the day on which the gates were closed, and the anniversary of the day on which the siege was raised, have been down to our own time celebrated by salutes, processions, banquets, and sermons. Lundy has been executed in effigy, and the sword said by IN MID OCEAN. 7 tradition to be that of Maumont has, on great occasions, been carried in triumph." How is it possible that a race with such memories could ever allow themselves to be governed from Dublin, or to take laws and to bear taxation at the hands of the less industrious and less educated moiety of the Irish community ? The mails duly arrived, and were brought along- side in the tossing steam-tug ; the anchor was got up out of the waters rendered so illustrious by the fortitude and patriotism of Ulstermen, and our good ship screwed her way forth from Lough Swilly, and, rounding Fanad Head, coasted for awhile along by "Frenchman's Rocks," and the huge cliffs of Horn Head, which tower 620 feet above the rest- less surf, to the sound running between Tory Island and the promontory which bears the emphatic title of "The Bloody Foreland." The black rocks of that evil-named cape, and the high white lighthouse on the isle, which has christened a great historical party, were the last landmarks for us of Ireland. If it be forbidden "to speak disrespectfully of the Equator," prudence must combine with politeness to repress any expressions of discontent or disgust at an ocean. While you are writing you are its waif and stray. Otherwise it would be a positive relief to the voyager imprisoned upon the dull, discon- solate, and inhospitable surface of this sub-Arctic sea to utter but a small part of the personal feelings with which its gloomy violence and hideous lack of life and colour and its bitter blasts of spiteful, icy 8 SEAS AND LANDS. wind, fill his mind. Justly did Lord Beaconsfield dub it a " melancholy ocean," and ascribe to its dreary contiguity most of the troubles of tearful Erin. A man must be, indeed, fond to passion of the sea if he can take pleasure in passing over such a cold, leaden-hued, sullen, sleepless, wild, and wind- scourged expanse as stretches, screams, foams, rolls, and rages round the ship where these far from un- measured words are being written. If the wet and chilly gale does not blow right ahead, pelting the pale waves against the steamer's stem, so that her whole vast weight of 5300 tons comes every minute squattering down into the inky waste, churning it into green and white sea- cream for furlongs, then that same hard, cold wind shifts a point or two northwards or southwards, so as to sweep one side or the other of the deck bare of shivering and staggering passengers. The inky waves dance high on either side, as if to see how we like it, but instantly have their crests lopped off and torn into spindrift by the wind, and sent in clouds of thin salt mist astern. Black are these billows, not "darkly, deeply, beautifully blue," as the ocean out of soundings should be ; for the steamer has now gone clear of that long gradual slope of the sea bottom which stretches out 230 miles from Ireland, and which only falls six feet in the mile throughout all the distance. She has, indeed, logged nearly 1000 knots by this time, and there must be two or three miles of salt water under her IN MID OCEAN. 9 keel, yet the ugly, wind-lashed, weltering North Atlantic keeps its sad leaden-hued look, vainly hissing and howling, as it were, at the brave pro- gress of our stout steamship. Not that the weather is so very particularly bad for such an ocean. Our excellent captain merely enters it day after day as " strong head winds and heavy sea." Old hands at crossing say that the passage is, indeed, rather a fair one for the latter part of August, and the ship accomplishes each twenty-four hours her 320 miles on an average. Christopher Columbus would never have had the desire to traverse a sea like that which has wallowed and spumed under us from the Bloody Foreland to the present longitude, where the quartermaster is dipping the thermometer overboard, to see if the Polar current has yet been reached. The ocean seen, and conquered for its beauty and light and mystery by the grand Genoese, was that bright expanse which stretches in majesty and splendour from the sunny coast of Cadiz ; and carries the glory of the orb "West from Numancos and Bayona's hold " to the lovely Antilles and the lively Caribbean main. That was the vast water originally named after the golden Atlas Range, and the graceful Atlantides, the immortal Ladies of the Wave : not this mournful, waste, desolate, and sailor-hating wilderness of wild grey crests and wandering winds, which pinch and scourge the faces of the poor emigrants, and freeze the warmest blood, and flap spray and coal smoke into the eyes, io SEAS AND LANDS. and make the chairs of many fair passengers dis- mally vacant at table, dinner after dinner. Our emigrants are particularly touching. The men, and some of the children, have found their sea legs, but many of the women still remain limp and listless bundles of spray-soaked gowns and wraps, cowering into the corners where the wind can perse- cute them least. They will never find the heart to come back over this murky waste until they have made fortunes, and can take cabin berths like ladies, and have beef-tea brought to them at all hours by attentive stewardesses. If anything like reckless terms have been employed above about the ugliness, the cruelty, and the stupid sombre violence of the North Atlantic, it was chiefly because of the brutal and bitter way in which it has added to the sorrows of these simple and honest exiles. They are of all sorts and conditions as regards place of origin, and will look better, no doubt, ashore, with their hair no longer blown about like tow, and their hands and faces, which have been unwashed for days, restored to decent cleanliness. The sea has taken, for the moment, all the coquetry and smartness out of even the Irish lasses. One of the Swedish maidens has tied her white pigtail up with a rope-yarn, the rude gale having stolen her cherry-coloured ribbon. A Belgian matron, too miserable to be particular, wore one stocking blue and one green yesterday, and her children will evidently not see soap and water until the St. Lawrence is reached. Yet it was exemplary to note how the Methodists IN MID OCEAN. n and Moravians among this suffering and self-banished crowd picked up their self-respect and courage, and shook off the depressing demon of mal de mer on Sunday afternoon, when an improvised service of hymns and prayer was held by some clergymen upon the main deck. One by one, all, except the most dilapidated and forlorn, drew towards the little congregation, standing bareheaded under the driving sea-clouds. The voice of him who read the supplica- tions, and pronounced a brief discourse to his some- what shattered batch of empire-builders, could hardly be caught, except occasionally, in the gusts of chill wind. But when an enthusiastic worshipper, with an accordion, made his instrument give, forth the tune of " Shall we gather at the River?" all seemed to know it, and struck in with a chorus as sweet as it was dauntless, which fairly vanquished the unkind wind and uncivil howling billows so that from end to end of the great steamship one could hear the voices of these men and women nay, even of the children, heaped about on the tarpaulins, all raising together the pious refrain of hope and faith. "Yes!" rang out the chorus, " we'll gather at the River the Golden River! that flows by the Throne of God." A gentle lady, leaning upon the rail overhead, and watching this service of praise performed in dis- regard of the elements, dropped kindly tears under the stress of tender and human thoughts inspired by the spectacle of adventurous hearts united for one exalted moment in an ecstasy of belief. Assuredly Sophocles was right when he said, " Many iz SEAS AND LANDS. things are wonderful but none is so wonderful as man." Coming past the Bloody Foreland we were in danger of being made captives of war. We were chased for a time by one of the armed cruisers from Admiral Baird's fleet. The pursuing vessel had very much the appearance of the Calypso, and put out to catch and capture us from behind Tory Island. But she was a long way to leeward when she first sighted the steamer ; which, albeit no racing liner, can easily do her fourteen knots ; so, after an angry spurt of half-an-hour, during which she could not come within cannon range, as we would not heave-to, and as " a stern chase is always a long chase," our enemy put his helm down and let us go on our watery road in peace. Two whales, blowing afar off, diversify for an hour the immense monotony of this heaving black wilderness of waters, over which a chilling and detestable north-westerly breeze is now fast turn- ing into a positive gale. They are not quite the only visible inhabitants of the dark sphere on which we float, for every day we see playing round the ship and skimming up and down the wave- hollows, companies of lovely little terns and sea- swallows, the latter no larger than thrushes. These fearless people of the waste have not by any means followed us from the land, living, as gulls often will, on the waste thrown from the vessel. They are vague and casual roamers of the ocean, who, spying the great steamship from afar, have sailed IN MID OCEAN. 13 close up, to see if we are a rock or an island, and will then skim away again on their own free and boundless business. Yonder tiny bird with purple and green plumage, his little breast and neck laced with silver, is distant a thousand miles at this moment from a drop of fresh water, and yet cares no more for that fact than did the Irish squire who "lived twelve miles from a lemon." If his wings ever grow weary it is but to settle quietly on the bosom of a great billow and suffer it for a time to rock and roll him amid the hissing spindrift, the milky flying foam, and the broken sea-lace, which forms, and gleams, and disappears again upon the dark slopes. When he pleases, a stroke of the small red foot and a beat of the wonderful wing launch him off from the jagged edge of his billow, and he flits past us at 100 knots an hour, laughing steam and canvas to scorn, and steering for some nameless crag in Labrador or Fundy, or bound, it may be, homeward for some island or marsh of the far-away Irish coast. Marvellously expressive of power as is our untiring engine, which all day and all night throbs and pants and pulses in noisy rhythm under the deck, what a clumsy imperfect affair it is compared to the dainty plumes and delicate muscles which will carry that pretty, fearless sea-swallow back to his roost. Our steamer is to make the land at Belleisle, entering the Straits between Labrador and New- foundland, and, after passing through these, will i 4 SEAS AND LANDS. cross the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and thread for 700 or 800 miles the great river of the Dominion. This land-fall and the approach by the Belleisle Straits are held dangerous by all navigators because of fogs and icebergs which are constantly encountered there together. A vessel of the line the Montreal was quite lately cast away on the rocks of the Straits, and our admirable and very popular skipper, Captain Lindall, will be all to-night on the bridge, and all to-morrow night also, conning his ship and taking heed for the 800 sleeping folk who make her a small floating town. Rolling and toss- ing on this gloomy, chilly, and unlovely ocean day after day, there must be few amongst our company who do not by this time long to see the light gleaming at Belleisle icebergs or no icebergs. To- morrow, if the sea-gods favour, we shall be in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But let it not be imagined for a moment that the unfriendly gales and uncomfortable rollers have suppressed the spirit of making the best of things which is common to the Anglo-Saxon blood, whether it flows in British or American, or "Blue-Nose" veins. The North Atlantic has not prevented except very occasionally our resolute promenading on the deck, our concerts in the saloon, our games at quoits and deck shuffle-board, nor the alternating hymns and waltzes of the pilgrim fathers, sisters, cousins, aunts, &c., who throng the after part of the ship. And if it be thought that we starve, because " the stormy winds IN MID OCEAN. 15 do blow," here is the dinner menu for one day of the voyage, when it was really a hard north- easter, with a driving sea, and the " fiddles " were on every table : August 24. Soups Julienne, mutton broth. Fish Cod and oyster sauce. Entrees Stewed kidneys, haricot ox tail, fricassee rabbit. Joints Roast beef and horse radish, roast lamb and mint sauce, roast turkey and cranberry sauce, roast goose and apple sauce, boiled mutton and caper sauce, boiled fowl and parsley sauce. Entremets Ox tongue and vegetables. Vegetables Boiled and baked potatoes, green peas, vegetable marrow. Pastry Sago pudding, apple, plum, and rhubarb pies, rock cakes. Dessert Plums, pears, melons, grapes, oranges. Coffee. Some apology is, moreover, now due to the North Atlantic, for, as the brave ship has drawn nearer the American shores, the wild weather has greatly relaxed, and the dark waves have run in pleasanter measure, and with more grace of colour, under a sky not wholly without patches of azure and gleam- ings of sunshine ; so that society on board has largely resumed its gaiety and content, and both forward and aft we are all inclined to forgive the " many-sounding sea." IN MID- ATLANTIC, Aug. 26, 1889. CHAPTER II. THE GULP OF ST. LAWRENCE. "ICE on the starboard bow!" The watch on the forecastle sang this out early in the day before our steamer made the Belleisle Lights, and many on board had then their first opportunity of beholding that lovely but terrible peril of the sea a floating ice- berg. This particular specimen glimmered on the distant surface like a huge sea-beryl, with a pale- greenish glow, and was perhaps as large as Salisbury Cathedral, with five or six times as much bulk below water as what was visible. Near to it floated some smaller hummocks and pieces of floe the avant- garde of the frosty flotilla which might now be expected upon our path. Save for this danger of icebergs, and of the fogs which too frequently beset the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it is per- fectly evident to any competent observer that this route would become not only a favourite highway to the New World, but would formidably and per- manently threaten the popularity of the direct roads pursued by other lines. The icebergs are a great drawback, and they are unfortunately most to be expected in those summer months when alone the navigation is open. The first heats of the brief but THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 17 hot Arctic sunshine set in rapid motion the glaciers of Labrador and Greenland. These vast storehouses of gathered and con- solidated snow glide to the edge of the tremendous ice-precipices of the Winter Lands, and, falling over them in monstrous masses, crash into the deep water with shocks which send thunder-peals through the still Polar air, and perturb the ocean far and near with rolling waves. Then, committed by so awful a launch to the southward - going currents, the great broken glittering mass goes solemnly sailing away in the unwonted sunshine. As it floats, the water, warmer than the air, melts its lower portion gradually, and detached pieces also fall from the visible part, until equilibrium becomes destroyed, and the colossal block capsizes with a second shock, startling the ocean for leagues around. But a vast number of these bergs are flat, and there are, besides, immense detached fields or floes which carry on their surface, without upsetting, boulders of rock, and mud, and detritus, scraped up by the cosmic chisels of the ice, and these, it is believed by many geologists, have borne from the Frozen circle, and deposited on the banks of Newfoundland, the vast deposits which have created those extensive shallows the feeding ground of fish, and the breed- ing place of mists. The loftier bergs drive slowly down inside and outside the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and haunt it with phantoms of destruction. Very weird, indeed, it is to catch, in the rays of the stars or new moon, or in the faint twilight B r8 SEAS AND LANDS, never absent from the rim of the sea, that pallid ghostly glare, as dim as a corpse-light, which draws from the look-out man this sudden cry of "Ice on the weather bow." The distant aspect is as though a gleam of greenish phosphorescence shot, afar off, from the ocean-depths ; but very soon the gaunt and glittering berg displays its splintered pinnacles and ledges of snow-clad crystals, and shows its fantastic shape full to the mariner. The clouds take no such variety of forms with which to engage the imagina- tion. Sometimes it seems a sea-temple of sculptured ice which floats by, all complete with dome, and porch, and archways. Sometimes it is of haystack outline, as if the spirits of the Pole had been harvesting their glassy crop of winter. Sometimes you might swear it was a full-rigged ship frozen to white death, or a fortress of the impregnable north, cut adrift from the Arctic ramparts. But, met with in the darkness, and not, perhaps, perceived until the glare of the ship's lamps is reflected back from its stealthy and silent onset, what peril can be more deadly ? At full speed the fated vessel dashes against that brittle but ruinous mass. Her stem pierces its outlying layers, only to be crumpled up against the unyielding heart of the cold floating mountain. Her fore-part is all crushed in, the sea fills her, and in fifteen minutes there will be, perchance, nothing to tell of the great and gallant vessel, except a boat or two crammed with hopeless castaways and the floating rifF-raff of the decks and gear of the victim, whose epitaph must be, " Not since heard of." THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 19 Save for this contingency of collision with ice- bergs, no gateway could be nobler, no approach to the American Continent more suitable and attractive than that which our good ship has pursued. Passing safely, and free of any serious fog or ice alarm, through the narrow inlet of the Belleisle Straits, the Vancouver steamed swiftly into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which expands immediately into a prodigious inland sea. It is an estuary of a river ; but what an estuary, and what a stream ! Truly a magnificent preface to the grand volume of geography which now opens to the eye and mind of the voyager. Did he deem oblivious of his maps that, once thus land-locked, he might consider the sea section of his passage terminated ? The basin of the great St. Lawrence river receives him into waters so capacious that for 300 miles he will hardly again espy dry land, and will not see the current reveal to him both its shores until at least 400 miles have been traversed. Hour after hour day, indeed, after day we skim on at full speed across the shorter but still lively waves of an expanse half as big as the Mediter- ranean, and although five days were sufficient to take us from continent to continent, the seventh day arrives before we reach Gaspe, and see dimly the coast of Nova Scotia. Further on lies, ragged with pines, the long island of Anticosti, full of bears, and dreaded by skippers for its dangerous reefs and shoals, and only long after its desolate uplands have faded away astern, does our steamer 20 SEAS AND LANDS. come in sight of the New Brunswick littoral about St. Anne des Monts. We are now in the true mouth of the St. Lawrence, and shall coast along the southern lip, "keeping the land in board." But the other lip is still 100 miles distant, and Rimouski must be passed and the Mille Vaches and Sault au Cochon breasted, before at last two shores are seen to this superb and unequalled channel, and we can perceive and know that every wave beneath the keel of the vessel is mingled with sweet water which has flowed forth from the great American lakes, and dashed in glory and in fury over the wild and white chasm of Niagara. You do not know at home at all events, you do not realise the magnificence of this your Canadian Nile, or the imperial importance of that Dominion of which it is the sustaining artery. We have now steamed at full speed for nearly three days up the ever-narrowing green bosom of the great St. Lawrence, and are but just arrived at our destination of Montreal, after nine days of voyaging. And, from the moment when both banks of this splendid waterway appeared together, until our arrival at the head of navigation in this hand- some city, there was visible on either shore an almost continuous line of little white cottages and humble, but evidently prosperous farmsteads, making, as it were, one long water-street of the river. Wherever these dwellings clustered thickly a pretty church would raise its pointed spire, cased in shining tin or zinc tiles, above the piles of sawn THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 21 planks, the well-filled barns, and the dark forests of spruce and hemlock. Everywhere solid tokens of well-being and social tranquillity ; but everywhere, also, to the observant eye, signs of priestly domination and postponement of civil progress to the interests of the Altar for along all this littoral, and far inland, over the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, the country remains intensely French and unchangeably Roman Catholic ; and you will note that the churches and chapels, the priests' houses and the convents, absorb most of the peasants' money, and cause the cottages to remain of one insignificant and submissive pattern. The names of the towns, villages, and tributary streams are all French ; all the Saints in the Gallic Calendar seem to have contributed their holy appel- lations to christen Lower Canada. Up to Quebec, high uplands of rolling and folded hills, fringed with the spiky firs, shut in the broad shining channel, and at every five or six leagues these suddenly part, and let down, between dark, forest-clad crags and grey cliffs of limestone, streams which in smaller countries would be a Thames, a Rhine, or an Ebro, but which here count well-nigh for nothing, as they pour their unregarded tribute of mountain water into this stupendous outlet of the lake system of North America. Only a few sails and boats are encountered ; small schooners and broad timber and cattle craft, propelled by huge square sails, occasionally relieve the silence and comparative solitude of the glorious river, and the crews of 22 SEAS AND LANDS. these, as well as the denizens of the shores, appear immensely interested in the passage of our great mail steamer, saluting us with shouts and waving kerchiefs, and sometimes with a coup de fusil. Our big steamer answers such homely welcomes with a snort or two upon her unmelodious fog- whistle which, let it be mentioned, was never so much as once sounded on all the route across not even in Belleisle Straits, where fogs are almost a matter of expectation. After the cold and tossing North Atlantic, imagine how agreeable and composing is the bright tranquillity of this broad and unruffled current. The ladies, who were wrapped a day or two ago in sombre hoods and ulsters, like grey and brown chrysalids, have now emerged, like brilliant butterflies, in summer toilettes. Many of them are returning home from the wonders of the Paris Exhibition and the delightful fatigues of an European tour, and know every reach and pro- montory of the great stream. "There is the best river for salmon ! Yonder, at the ' Pig's Jump,' is the place for strawberries and bears, and over those hills is the Cascapedia valley, where his Ex- cellency the Governor- General goes to fish." On the northern shore behind the nearer uplands clothed with endless spruce, hemlock, sumach, and birch runs along, with the full dignity of a moun- tain range, the long ridge of the Laurentian rocks, the primitive foundation-stuff of the globe, which we shall not drop from view until far above Montreal. THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 23 At the island of St. Louis we are so far up the stupendous river that, though the tides push its current back, the water is now almost or quite fresh ; and so, gliding hour after hour along the still scarcely diminished channel for ever passing the little white houses, the well-stuffed barns, the churches, the convents, the small jutting piers with their beacons, the tiny red lightships moored in midstream to guide the nocturnal voyageur, the herds of grazing cattle, the green patches of potatoes, rye, barley, and melons, the lumber-yards, the sawmills, the beaches covered with canoes, and the groups of French-looking residents our stout ship steams placidly at last along the " Island of Orleans," and comes in view of the stately Citadel of Quebec, with the ancient French houses at its foot, and the masts of much shipping. She snorts a reverence to Her Majesty's war-ship the Bellerophon, lying at anchor off the Point Levi, and dips her en- sign, which salute the handsome man-of-war returns, for we are the mail-boat, and of high importance. Then, our skilful captain brings his soootonner alongside the new docks as softly and steadily as if she were an eight-oar finishing practice, and we are moored stem and stern under the " Heights of Abraham." Quebec, conquered by the military genius of Wolfe in 1759, has remained unvanquished in regard to her language and population. She is still almost as much France as St. Malo or Rouen, and the first indigene whom you address in English for 24 SEAS AND LANDS. guidance will reply, "pas sais parler Anglaise" If you remember, as a Briton must, the debt of Empire due to the great soldier of King George, you will bend earliest steps to the eminence on which frowns the impregnable citadel. You will have in your mind those noble lines of Cowper " Time was when it was praise and boast enough, In every clime, and travel where we might, That we were born her children ; fame enough To fill th' ambition of a common man, That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue, And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own." The ancient city as a local authority justly observes gives the impression as though a frag- ment of the Old World had been transferred to the New, and carefully hidden away in this remote corner for safe keeping. Owing to the strength of the defences, and the steepness of the hill, Quebec is rightly called the " Gibraltar of America." Whether seen from below, or when ascending the river, or from the railway station or steamer-landing, the view of the town and citadel is equally novel ana impressive. Yet how changed in all except nature, since the wild woods and towering rocks were first visited in 1535, by Jacques Cartier, and the founda- tion of a town laid by Samuel de Champlain, in 1608. This was on the site of the Indian village of " Stadicona," at the confluence of the St. Law- rence and St. Charles rivers. Note as you climb the Champlain steps the old French names on the shops, the dark eyes and hair which tell of French de- THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 25 scent, and the great blocks of ice which are being deposited from a cart at every door, as the milk is left, or the newspaper, at home with us. The Canadian summer is still fervid here, and the " habitants " have caught the dangerous American taste for cooled drinks. By a massive portal you enter at length the fortress, leaving on one side the Parliament House in Grande Allee. Standing in any one of the river bastions, and gazing over the ramparts and the glacis, your glance takes in one of the noblest prospects of the globe. To the right the interminable river sweeps down from Ontario and Niagara. In front Point Levi frames the picture with a background of woodlands and buildings, and under your feet is the quaint old- fashioned French town and the crowded shipping. All is as tranquil as the stream itself; but to remind you of old scenes of carnage, and the changed con- ditions of modern warfare, the Bellerophon at this moment fires a torpedo for practice, blowing some 500 tons of the St. Lawrence high into the air, and making in the river a huge circle of mud and dying fish, which goes whirling and expanding down the current. The thunder of the explosion rolls back from Point Levi to Cape Diamond, and dies away high up among the fir-woods on the left, where Wolfe, after delivering his feint attack, landed his forces at night, by a flotilla of boats, and surprised the unsuspecting Montcalm by appearing suddenly on the plateau. The chivalrous Frenchman, instead of confiding in his stone walls, came rashly forth 26 SEAS AND LANDS. to fight in the open for the possession of Canada, and yonder obelisk marks the spot where Wolfe fell in the instant of victory, and where Montcalm also received his death-wound. It is good to find the names of both heroes linked together upon the memorial here, as well as lower down in the Des Carrieres Street. The latter bears a nobly epigram- matic inscription MORTEM. VIRTUS COMMUNE1C FAMAM HISTORIA MONUMENTUM POSTERITA8 DEDIT which, for the sake of all patriotic Englishwomen, may be translated Their valour gave a common fate, Their worth a common fame ; English and French, we here inscribe In common love, each name. They say, as the surgeon drew the fatal musket ball from the wound of Wolfe, he exclaimed, " Why, this is not the bullet of an enemy ! " and that the gallant general answered with a faint smile on his dying face gay even in extremity " Well, Doctor, I don't think it could be the bullet of a friend ! " Wolfe has a proud and ornate monument in West- minster Abbey but here is his true mausoleum, in the fair meadows and forests, the far pine-clad ranges, the broad, majestic river, the peaceful, prosperous Dominion, and, above it all, the flutter and the glitter of that Union Jack upon the flagstaff THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. 27 in the Bastion, which marks it all " British America," a territory one-fifteenth of the whole earth's surface, larger by one-tenth than all the United States, and only smaller than all the Continent of Europe by the area of Spain; a gift to the British Empire bought with most generous blood, and worth retain- ing, while it is willing to be retained, with all the energies and resources of that Empire. MONTREAL, Sept. i, 1889. CHAPTER III. MONTREAL AND TORONTO. IT was impressive to watch the excitement and interest of our emigrants at the moment of reaching the quay at Montreal. This is their port of dis- embarkation, and being Sunday evening, when all the population not in church and chapel was dis- engaged, "the city cast Its people forth upon us." We drew up alongside the wharf, and in close proximity to Her Majesty's men-of-war Tourmaline and Pylades, amid a flutter of welcoming hand- kerchiefs and a forest of waving hands. Everybody on board seemed indeed to have friends on shore, except one humorous and lonely Irishman, who, vexed to be " out in the cold " amidst such a genial display of sentiment, was heard to say to another Hibernian, " Dennis, honey, just go over the gangway and rowl your hat round and round towards me, for it's mighty quare and solithary I'm seeming at this minute ! " Truly it was an instant of natural emotion with all these poor people to come thus to their new home, safe and sound, but each with an uncut tome of life's three-volume MONTREAL AND TORONTO. 29 novel before him or her, and all these new faces, new places, new scenes, and new circumstances ashore to encounter. Yet the glorious "elbow-room" of this Dominion, its boundless fields and forests, its free air and immense future capacities, made one wish that they were a whole army of East-end Londoners we were throwing ashore instead of a mere detachment. There is room here for all who will come with the will to work hard ; but those most sure to succeed are immigrants knowing a trade, and possessing a little capital. There are no poor visible about the streets of Montreal ; a beggar is an unheard-of phenomenon crackers and pork, eggs and melons, fish and meal are too cheap for hunger to be ever felt by anybody with a pair of hands. Especially good and pleasant it was to see Lady Stanley of Preston on the wharf looking after the welfare of the newcomers to her husband's Viceroyalty. Another people besides beggars of whom you see nothing in and about the stately and vigorous city of Montreal are those Red Indians to whom the land originally belonged. A little village near the "Royal Mount" harbours, indeed, a remnant of half-breeds, a feeble folk, living by the sale of bead- work and models of bark canoes, representative, in a melancholy, flickering manner, of the Algonquins and Hurons and such like, who were the landed proprietors hereabouts when the Kings of France first cast eyes of desire upon the region. How far away in date, and farther still in events, that 30 SEAS AND LANDS. historical act when, on March 7, 1604, two vessels set sail from the Old World bearing Pierre de Gast, the well-beloved friend of King Henry IV. of France, who had by royal patent the previous year granted to the Sieur des Monts all the American territory between the fortieth and forty-sixth de- grees of north latitude, with the royal authority to colonise and govern it according to his own judgment ! With the expedition came Samuel Champlain, pilot, one of the earliest discoverers of the country. After an ocean voyage of two months the fleet landed on the southerly side of the peninsula of Nova Scotia. From this point they sailed along the shore of Nova Scotia, explored the Bay of Fundy, and thence proceeded to the waters of Passama- quoddy, which Des Monts and his men called a " sea of salt water." This was the first expedition to these waters. Passing through the outer fringe of islands, the ships crossed the bay, and ascended the Schoodic (St. Croix) River, near the present town of St. Andrews. In the same quiet and almost furtive style arrived the other pioneers earlier and later the Cabots and Cartiers, and the rest ; laying hold gradually of this magnificent region, as the " white man's foot," a plant which you see in the Canadian clearings, has stolen into the flora of the woods and thrust the Indian grasses aside. Yet none of these original colonists could have imagined, even in their wildest dreams, a city to be so large and complete as Montreal, the commercial Queen of MONTREAL AND TORONTO. 31 the Dominion. Montreal is situated on an island, at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers, containing 197 square miles, which, from its fertility, has been called the garden of Canada. The St. Lawrence is i^ miles wide opposite the city, and the whole river front is lined with massive walls, quays, and terraces of grey limestone, which is rather of a depressing colour, unless lighted up by the sun. There is, however, a warm red sand- stone hereabouts, largely and skilfully employed by the Montreal masons, and this produces excellent effects, and makes one wish Montreal had found it out before, for she might have then rivalled Jeypore or Futtehpore Sikri the Indian cities in richness of general tint. Nevertheless, it is a really hand- some and imposing capital, commanding the trade of the great river, albeit 800 miles from its mouth. Built chiefly on the level ground between Mount Royal and the river, it climbs far and wide over the high ground near Mount Royal, where are to be found many charming private residences, and a fashionable drive extending round the mountain, bordered by gardens and ornamental enclosures, and affording fine views in all directions. The public buildings are fine, especially the church of the Jesuits. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is of great size, and the view from one of its towers, in which hangs " Gros Bourdon," the great bell, singularly extensive and interesting. It is characteristic of the passion here to save time and trouble that you mount to the top of the highest church-tower in 32 SEAS AND LANDS. Montreal by a lift and very convenient is the innovation, if not strictly canonical. Montreal has pretty public gardens, copious and pure supplies of mountain water, and unlimited privileges in the way of electric lighting, telephones, and telegraph wires ; but these involve, unfortunately, the universal presence of those odious and hideous poles which rear their gaunt, rough, unpainted nakedness along every street. Huge fir trunks they are, half-dressed from the forest, enormously thick and tall, and in Montreal, as in so many another town and city of the Dominion and of the States, they spoil the most charming and stately vistas. Leaving behind in this agreeable place many new and pleasant friends, we plunged deeper yet into the "Queen's America" by taking train, on the Grand Trunk Line, for Toronto. The voyage by river from Belleisle Straits goes all the way steadily south- wards, and we had now come into the last and hottest days of the Canadian summer. With 85 degrees in the shade, and a cloudless sky overhead, the broad and fair land on either side of the track seemed almost to smoke with heat ; but plentiful recent showers had left it green, and it was difficult to realise that in a short time all that glowing landscape would be covered with deep snow, the forests glittering with frost-crystals, and the streams locked in ice. Yet the Canadian winter is not spoken of as any hardship. The snow keeps the seeds and the soil warm with its white blanket ; it makes roads for the lumbermen in the woods, and MONTREAL AND TORONTO. 33 for the merry sleigh-parties in the towns ; and the still atmosphere, bracing and salubrious, renders not only tolerable, but even positively pleasant, tempera- tures so much below zero, that brandy freezes at them ; and the milk, and pork, and butter are sold in icy blocks, cut off with a hatchet. Now, at the beginning of September, it is high summer-tide, the fair Canadians go about in muslins, and the farm labourers work in a thin jersey, while we must keep open all the windows and doors of the Pullman car, which is flying along the northern shore of Ontario, to obtain air enough this sultry noon. Suddenly transported hither, a careless observer would hardly know he was not in England. The population, of course, is largely British, the names of the stations are occasionally very much so, for we stop successively at Brighton, Whitby, Scarborough, as well as at spots with Indian titles, and others christened after French saints or local points of interest, or bygone pioneers of civilisation. There are, it is true, everywhere the " snake fences," those abominations of ugliness and wasted material, which wriggle and bristle all over the otherwise pretty landscape, raggedly dividing the fields and spoil- ing their trimness and agricultural grace. It is so deplorably easy to build these straggling horrors, and the stuff is so cheap, that we must expect to encounter them everywhere ; but they would mar the look of any country in the world, and make one think with new affection of the green hedges of England. 34 SEAS AND LANDS. Elsewhere it is all English enough. The wild blossoming herbs, noticeable along the line, are old acquaintances. We note the golden rod, the cornflower, the purple thistle, the Michaelmas daisy, the dragon's mouth, the dock, plantain, and other familiar friends ; but no daisies and no ivy. Large levels and uplands, fringed with woodlands of fir and spruce, meet the eye sometimes in pasture, sometimes covered with crops, just ripening, of buckwheat, barley, rye, and Indian corn. Con- stantly the primitive forest comes down to the line, and we dash through leagues of dark, cool undergrowth, amid the dense columns of pine-stems, entering now and then a clearing, now and then a space made black and open by reason of forest fires, and then the farms, the pastures, and the barley- fields once more. Almost all these fields are full of the stumps of felled trees, for it has been less labour to plough, sow, and reap round and round these relics of the youth of the colony, than to remove them ; and thus a considerable part of the region wears the look of an interminable cemetery, where these black and grey roots are the gravestones of the ancient universal pine-woods, and of their Iroquois and Huron owners. But that we may not forget Ireland among these unusual impediments of agri- culture, our train has just swept across the Ottawa River, at the pretty station of St. Anne. This locality the "Bout de I'lsle" is much frequented by Montreali sts in the summer season, and possesses an ancient church, revered by the Canadian boatmen MONTREAL AND TORONTO. 35 and voyageurs. The Ottawa is here crossed by a fine railway bridge, and the famous rapids of St. Anne are flanked by a canal. And here, of all places in the world, it was that Moore wrote his well-known Canadian boat-song beginning " Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune, and our oars keep time. Soon as the woods on the shore look dim We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn. Row, brothers, row ; the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, and the daylight's past." It is pleasant to think that good songs live when great forests vanish and races pass away. These 300 odd miles of Canada, traversed by the Grand Central Railway, are diversified, as has been remarked, by rocks and streams, by lonely villages and populous towns, by plains broad and open, covered with crops, and tracts as wild and untouched as when the red man's moccasins alone trod them. The immense expanse continually astonishes, and its endless abundance of rough pasture and forest. And yet all this is only a fringe and fragment of the vast Dominion. Our 330 miles run to-day through such a region is but a kind of drive from one home- stead to another. But it shows us Canada busy and prosperous train after train goes past, laden with lumber, grain, fruits, agricultural machinery, and cattle. Especially notable is the " Hog-express," laden with unhappy pigs in a state of unwieldy obesity, which have now to expiate unlimited rations of maize and swill in their happy Western styes, by 36 SEAS AND LANDS. this fatal journey to Montreal, or Quebec, or Halifax, where they will be slaughtered and salted down. One train passing us contained more than 10,000 of these ill-starred animals, grunting and squeaking at every blast of the steam-horn, and each new shock of the buffers. The chorus of porcine protest was loud and sad ; and, indeed, only a Mussulman could have refrained from pitying the plaintive snouts pressed close to the iron bars of the trucks for fresh air, and the eloquent tails, which protruded through them, and were twisted into perfect corkscrews of astonishment and despair. Some of these fattened hogs are shipped for England alive at the Dominion ports, as it is found to be the cheapest way of transporting to Great Britain the eight or ten quarters of maize which each pig represents, and the pork-butchers of Liverpool rather prefer to dress the carcasses themselves. But large consignments of the swine go over, slaughtered and salted ; and we saw but would not enter those sanguinary estab- lishments where a minute and a quarter of merciless machinery converts hog after hog, to the number of thousands in the day, from such earthly pleasures as a pig can know, to the posthumous honours of bacon. Toronto sits splendidly on the western extremity of her lake, which presents, even here, the unwonted spectacle to the British eyes of a boundless ex- panse of fresh water. Gaze as far and as steadily as you will into that south-eastern horizon, and deepen your search with the aid of the glass, yet no faintest MONTREAL AND TORONTO. 37 loom of land arises over the placid light grey wavelets. You would have to sail seventy miles in that direc- tion to reach the American shore, and one hundred miles to get back into the narrows near Kingston, where nestle the thousand islands with their green and varied beauty. This fair, free, inland sea has, no doubt, the fault of lying enclosed by a low coast, so that it suggests the idea of shallowness, and lacks the first element of lake scenery. But with Niagara at one end of it and the Great St. Lawrence at the other it can afford, like the little Sea of Galilee, which is also very far from beautiful in its surroundings, to go without the usual romantic accessories. Its bosom is dotted with steamers, coming and going, \\itli well-built schooners, two and three-masted, as well as pleasure yachts and boats of all sorts, moored or moving in the city harbour, which is formed by the washings from the sandstone ridges eastwards. Huge red grain elevators rise on the shore, which sweeps round in a flattened crescent towards the mouth of the Niagara River, and that famous cleft where Erie pours the waters she has received from Huron, Michigan, and Superior, into Ontario. On fine days the cloud formed by the spray from the great cataract, and always hanging over it, can be discerned from the tower of Toronto University, albeit forty miles distant. Anybody might be contented to reside in this charming city, which was once called York, but has now the pretty Indian word for its " married and settled name." Its streets are broad, well-paved, 3 8 SEAS AND LANDS. and regularly laid out. The principal public and private dwellings are substantially built, and de- lightful villas abound in the environs. At "The Grange," where this is written, the pleasant resi- dence of Professor Goldwin Smith, we have old English lawns, and might be at Oxford. The leading thoroughfares are King, Queen, and Yonge Streets ; the most important building is the Uni- versity, in a large park, approached by College Avenue, which is over half a mile long, lined by a double row of trees. The University over which the learned President, Sir Daniel Wilson, did us the honour to be our guide is really very imposing architecturally, and well equipped for its important functions. But, thus far, Canada does not seem to have given birth to any unique local genius in scholarship or art. She still too much imports her literature and learning, albeit the land is one well fitted to inspire patriotism with new poetic colours, and capacity with original ideas. The city lies between the Don and the Humber rivers, and really on dirait du veau ! you would think you were in an English town as you walk its streets. For the matter of that, illusions are - easy. You may travel a little way westward, and come to London itself. The Canadian London stands quite properly in the county of Middlesex, overlooking the valley of the Thames, and has its Piccadilly, its Regent Street, its Pall Mall and Westminster Bridge, as well as a Cathedral and very seriously built public edifices. But, at present, MONTREAL AND TORONTO. 39 it only numbers 20,000 Londoners the rest are to come when Canada has settled the two great prob- lems which agitate her bosom, that of the French- speaking and Jesuit-ruled population, and that of the proposed commercial union with the States. The only objects which strike the eye at all strangely as the Englishman strolls the wide streets of Toronto will be the planked side-walks, the fans revolving in the confectioners' windows to keep the flies away, and the eternal eyesore of those huge poles for the telephonic and telegraphic wires. In this bright and lively city everybody chatters all day long by electric current, every respectable resi- dence and shop has all the ears of Toronto open to it. In the midst of a conversation at lunch you start up to seek by the telephone the views of a friend, a mile off, and inquire if people are at home by scientific whispers, before setting forth to call upon them. London is an age behind her little name- sake of Ontario in electrical conveniences. Of Canadian politics nothing has been or will be here said. It is an unpardonable arrogance for a man to imagine that he a human bird of passage however well accustomed to " bird's-eye views " of public life and public problems, can pick up information worth imparting upon national ques- tions as he speeds through the societies of a land. Perhaps the profound mystery has been privately dispelled, which lurked at first in the words, read in a local journal, "The East London Grits- have fallen back upon Mr. Smith." Perhaps an explana- 40 SEAS AND LANDS. tion has been given secretly why the Premier of a Canadian province, who as our shipmate was of such admirable courtesy, intelligence, and social charm, should be described in another local journal as " equally impervious to considerations of public and domestic morality." We may have come to understand a little better than at first, the genial ferocity of politics here ; and certain small mole- hills which figure in them for mountains ; but the broad facts are that Canada is alive, robust, and loyal, and wants only plenty of English and Scotch and Welsh immigrants, who will stop in the colony and develop its natural resources, to settle and to control the French element, and then without the desperate expedient of burning down the house of her commercial independence in order to roast the Gallic pig she will do well enough. TORONTO, Sept. 7, 1889. CHAPTER IV. NIAGARA. BEFORE the balcony in which this is written the Great Cataract of America is thundering, smoking, glittering with green and white rollers and rapids, hurling the waters of a whole continent in splendour and speed over the sharp ledges of the long brown rock by which Erie " the Broad " steps proudly down to Ontario " the Beautiful." Close at hand on our left not indeed farther removed than some 600 or 700 yards the smaller but very imposing American Fall speaks with the louder voice of the two, because its coiling spirals of twisted and furious flood crash in full impulse of descent upon the talus of massive boulders heaped up at its foot. The resounding impact of water on rock, the clouds of water-smoke which rise high in air while the river below is churned into a whirling cream of eddy and surge and backwater, unite in a com- posite effect, at once magnificent and bewildering. But if you listen attentively you will always hear the profound diapason of the great Fall that sur- named the Horseshoe sounding superbly amid the loudest clamour and tumult of its sister, a deeper and grander note ; and whenever for a time the A2 SEAS AND LANDS. gaze rests with inexhaustible wonder upon that fierce and tumultuary American Fall, this mightier and still more marvellous Horseshoe steals it away again with irresistible fascination. Full in front lies that wholly indescribable spectacle at this instant. Its solemn voice an octave lower than the excited, leaping, almost angry cry of fervid life from the lesser cataract resounds through the golden summer morning air like the distant roar from the streets of fifty Londons all in full activity. Far away, between the dark grey trees of Goat Island and the fir- woods of the Canadian shore, the Niagara River is seen winding eagerly to its prodigious leap. You can discern, even from this balcony, the line of the first breakers, where the Niagara River feels, across its whole breadth, the fateful draw of the Cataracts, where its current seems suddenly to leap forward, stimulated by a mad desire, a hidden spell, a dreadful and irresistible doom. You can note far back along the gilded surface of the upper stream how these lines of dancing, tossing, eager, anxious, and fate-impelled breakers and billows multiply their white ranks and spread and close together their leaping ridges into a wild chaos pf racing waves as the brink is approached. And then, at the brink there is a curious pause the momentary peace of the Irrevocable. Those mad upper waters reaching the great leap are sud- denly become all quiet, and glassy, and rounded, and green as the border of a field of rye, while they turn the angle of the dreadful ledge and hurl NIAGARA. 43 themselves into the snow-white gulf of noise, and mist, and mystery underneath. There is nothing more translucently green, nor more perennially still and lovely, than the actual hanging brow of Niagara the Greater. At her awful hrink the whole architrave of the main abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought in polished aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely coloured cornice of the enormous waterfall this brim of bright tranquillity between fervour of rush and fury of plunge is its principal feature, and stamps it as far more beautiful than terrible. Indeed the whole spectacle of the famous cataracts is one of delight and of deepest charm, not by any means of horror or of awe ; since nowhere are the measureless forces of Nature more tenderly revealed, more softly and splendidly clad, more demurely constrained and docile between its steep confines. Even the heart of the abyss, in the recess of the Horseshoe, where the waters of Erie and Superior clash together in tremendous conflict the inner madness and miracle of which no eye can see or ever will see, by reason of the veils of milky spray and of the rolling clouds of water-drift which for ever hide it even this central solemnity and shudder-fraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is ren- dered exquisite, reposeful, and soothing by the lovely rainbows hanging over the turmoil and clamour. From its crest of chrysoprase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky foam and of white stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to begin 44 SEAS AND LANDS. at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely and deliciously graceful, glad, and lovely a specimen of the splendour and wonder of water at its finest a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect it either in act of seeing, or to haunt it in future days of memory, with any wild reminiscence of terror or of gloom. It was impossible that a country like Canada, full of such magnificent natural scenes and spectacles, should not have inspired some of her native-born children ; and it has been wrongly stated in a previous communication that the " Land of the Maple-Leaf" had produced no local poets. Better opportunities of information and of study correct this erroneous view, and the present letter shall contain a brief conspectus of the indigenous poetry of the Dominion, with samples enough of the Canadian Muse to prove that the thunder of Niagara, the softer music of the river and rapids of the upper regions, and the placid ripple of the Sweet- Water Seas, have found echoes in Canadian hearts. Mr. Lighthall, of Montreal, says well in his " Songs of the Great Dominion " " Here are voices cheerful with the consciousness of young might, public wealth, and heroism. Through them, taken alto- gether, you may catch something of great Niagara falling, of brown rivers rushing with foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the moose and caribou, the lament of vanishing races singing their NIAGARA. 45 death-song as they are swept on to the cataract of oblivion, the rural sounds of Arcadias just rescued from surrounding wildernesses by the axe, shrill war-whoops of Iroquois battle, proud traditions of contests with the French and the Americans, stern and sorrowful cries of valour rising to curb rebellion. The tone of them is courage ; for to hunt, to fight, to hew out a farm, one must be a man ! The delight of a clear atmosphere runs through them too, and the rejoicings of that Winter Carnival which is only possible in the most athletic country in the world ; with the glint of that Ice Palace of illumined pearl, which makes the February pilgrimage of North America." Canadian poetry is full of the canoe, as Australian verse begins and ends with the horse, or the French chansons of the Lower Provinces with love. The note of the paddle is constantly heard, as in this verse by Mr. James D. Edgar *' A cooling plunge at the break of day, A paddle, a row, or sail ; With always a fish for a midday dish, And plenty of Adam's ale ; With rod or gun, or in hammock swung, We glide through the pleasant days ; When darkness falls on our canvas walls, We kindle the camp-fire's blaze." And Mr. Bliss Carman's ode to his favourite canoe, " The Red Swan," is worth remembering in almost every line. Here is a sample " Through many an evening gone, Where the roses drank the breeze, 46 SEAS AND LANDS. When the pale slow moon outshone Through the slanting trees, I have dreamed of the long Red Swan. How I should know that one Great stroke, and the time of the swing Urging her on and on, Spring after spring, Lifting the long Red Swan, Lifting the long Red Swan ! How I should drink the foam The far white lines from her swift Keen bow, when burning to come, With lift upon lift The long Red Swan flew home ! " But perhaps the most striking writer of Canadian verse is the late brilliant Isabella Valancey Craw- ford. This remarkable girl, living in the " Empire " province of Ontario, early felt the influences of the natural wonders around her, and had she lived longer might have made a name. But in 1884 her modest volume came out, and the sad story of unrecognised genius and death was re-enacted. " Malcolm's Katie, and other Poems," almost dropped stillborn from the press. Scarcely anybody noticed it in Canada. It made no stir, and in little more than two years the authoress died. She was a hii>-h- spirited, passionate girl, and there is very little doubt that the neglect her book received was the cause of her death. Afterwards, as usual, a good many people began to find they had overlooked work of merit. Miss Crawford's verse is, in fact, exceptional. Here, for example, is good writing for a settler girl listening to the lumberers NIAGARA. 47 " Bite deep and wide, O Axe, this tree ; What doth thy bold voice promise me 1 I promise thee all joyous things, That furnish forth the lives of kings 1 For ev'ry silver ringing blow, Cities and palaces shall grow 1 Bite deep and wide, Axe, the tree ; Tell wider prophecies to me. When rust hath gnaw'd me deep and red, A nation strong shall lift her head ! Her crown the very Heav'ns shall smite, ^Eons shall build her in their might ! Bite deep and wide, O Axe, the tree ; Bright Seer, help on thy prophecy ! " Very good work again is seen in Miss Crawford's " Malcolm's Katie." In proof, let anybody read these lines, redolent of the night-waving pines and the hunter's life " My masters twain their tent-fire lit, Streamed incense from the hissing cones ; Large crimson flashes grew and whirl'd, Thin golden nerves of sly light curl'd Round the dun camp, and rose faint zones Half-way about each grim bole knit, Like a shy child that would bedeck With its soft clasp a Brave's red neck ; Yet sees the rough shield on his breast, The awful plumes shake on his crest, And fearful drops her timid face, Nor dares complete the sweet embrace. They hung the slaughte.r'd fish like swords, On saplings slim, like scimitars 4 8 SEAS AND LANDS. Bright, and ruddied from new-waged wars, Blazed in the light the scaly hordes. They piled up boughs beneath the trees Of cedar-web and green fir tassel ; Low did the pointed pine-tops rustle, The camp-fire flush'd to the tender breeze. The hounds laid dew-laps on the ground, With needles of pine, sweet, soft, and rusty Dream'd of the dead stag, stout and lusty ; A bat by the red flames wove its round. The darkness built its wigwam walls Close round the camp, and at its curtain Press'd shapes, thin woven and uncertain, The white locks of tall waterfalls." Moreover, to show what fine and delicate songs the Canadian Sappho could indite, let this sweet and almost perfect little lyric be rescued for general admiration from the gloom of the backwoods " Love builds on the azure sea, And Love builds on the golden strand ; And Love builds on the rose-wing'd cloud, And sometimes Love builds on the land. if Love builds on sparkling sea, And if Love builds on golden strand, And if Love builds on rosy clouds To Love, these are the solid land. O Love will build his lily walls, And Love his pearly roof will rear On cloud or land, or mist or sea ; Love's solid land is everywhere ! " One peculiar feature of Canadian verse, indeed, is its strength in lady singers. The number who have produced good, or fairly good, poetry, is headed NIAGARA. 49 by the gifted girl just cited, but Mrs. Sarah Anne Curzon writes with power and spirit. The best war songs of the late half-breed rebellion were written by Annie Rothwell, of Kingston. " Fidelis " (Agnes Maude Machar), who is frequently called the first of Dominion poetesses, excels in a graceful subjectivity. Then there are Kate Seymour Mac- leur, authoress of " The Coming of the Princess ; " " Seranus," of Toronto (Mrs. Harrison), whose "Rose Latulippe" is quite charming; Miss Pauline Johnson, of Indian descent ; Miss Ardagh, Mrs. Leprohon, with many others, among whom may again be quoted "Fidelis," for her spirited lines in answer to the Laureate, and in vindication of the loyalty of Canada CANADA TO THE LAUREATE. " ' And that true North, whereof we lately heard A strain to shame us ! Keep you to yourselves, So loyal is too costly ! Friends, your love Is but a burden : loose the bond ami go Is this the tone of Empire t ' (Tennyson's Ode to the Queen.) " We thank thee, Laureate, for thy kindly words Spoken for us to her to whom we look With loyal love, across the misty sea ; Thy noble words, whose generous tone may shame The cold and heartless strain that said ' Begone, We want your love no longer ; all our aim Is riches that your love can not increase ! ' Fain would we tell them that we do not seek To hang dependent, like a helpless brood That, selfish, drag a weary mother down ; For we have British hearts and British blood That leap up, eager, when the danger calls ! 5 o SEAS AND LANDS. Once and again our sons have sprung to arms TO fight in Britain's quarrel not our own And drive the covetous invader back, Who would have let us, peaceful, keep our own, So we had cast the British name away. Canadian blood has dyed Canadian soil, For Britain's honour, that we deemed our own, Nor do we ask but for the right to keep Unbroken, still, the cherished filial tie That binds us to the distant sea-girt isle Our fathers leved, and taught their sons to love, As the dear home of freemen, brave and true, And loving honour more than ease or gold." Next comes a whole cohort of Canadian poets who sing principally of Imperial Federation, the new nationality, the Indians, the Voyageurs, and Habitans, settlement life, historical incidents, places, and seasons. Canadian history, as all acquainted with Parkman will know, teems with noble deeds and great events, of which only a small part have been sung. The North- West and British Columbia the gold-diggings province, the salmon rivers, the Douglas firs, which hide daylight at noonday- have yet to find their chroniclers. The poetry of the Winter Carnival, splendid scenic spectacle of gay Northern arts and delights, is to come also. Those who have been present at the thrilling spectacle of the nocturnal storming of the Ice Palace in Montreal, " when the whole city, dressing itself in the picturesque snow-shoe costume and arraying its streets in lights and colours, rises as one man in a tumultuous enthusiasm," feel that it should inspire fitting verse. As for the climate of Canada, winter is not perpetual, but merely, in most parts, NIAGARA. 51 somewhat long. It does not strike the inhabitants as intolerably severe. It is the season of most of their enjoyments ; gives them their best roads ; is indispensable to some industries, such as lumber- ing ; and the clear nights and diamond days are sparklingly beautiful. " Furthermore, the climate is not one but several. In British Columbia it is so equable the whole year round that roses some- times bloom out of doors in January, and the cactus is a native plant. In the Niagara penin- sula grapes and peaches are crops raised yearly in immense quantities, and the sycamore and acacia flourish. On the plains temperature grows milder in proportion as you approach to the Rocky Moun- tains." As Mr. William Wye Smith writes about the " Canadians on the Nile " " the East is but the West, with the sun a little hotter ; And the pine becomes a palm, by the dark Egyptian water : And the Nile's like many a stream we know, that fills its brimming cup We'll think it is the Ottawa, as we track the batteaux up ! Pull, pull, pull ! as we track the batteaux up ! It's easy shooting homeward, when we're at the top ! " Sometimes the dark mysterious glades and rushing, nameless streams of the Dominion have inspired worthily her indigenous minstrels, as in these striking verses of Mr. Wilfred Campbell on a backwood channel named the "Restless River" " Men say, at noon of day, In thickets far away Where skies are dim and grey, 5 a SEAS AND LANDS. And birches stir and shiver, That out of the gloomy air A voice goes up in prayer From the shores of the Restless Eiver. M 7 hatever its sin hath been, Its shores are still as green, And over it kindly lean Great forests heavenward growing ; And its waters are as sweet, And its tides more strong and fleet Than of any river flowing. But for all its outward mirth, And the glow that spans its girth, Its voices from air and earth, Its walls of leaves that quiver ; Men say an awful curse, As dread as death, and worse, Hangs over the Kestless River. And the dreamy Indian girl When she sees its waters curl In many a silver whirl, Hath pity on Restless River ; For she knoweth that, long ago, Its tides, that once were slow, By reason of some dread woe Went suddenly swift for ever : That a dread and unknown curse, For a sin, or something worse, Was laid on the Restless River." Sometimes it is the stateliness and splendid growth of their young cities which stirs their imagination, as in this sonnet by Mr. Lighthall to Montreal "Reign on, majestic Ville-Marie ! Spread wide thy ample robes of state ; The heralds cry that thou art great, And proud are thy young sons of thee. NIAGARA. 53 Mistress of half a continent, Thou risest from thy girlhood's rest ; We see thee conscious heave thy breast And feel thy rank and thy descent, Sprung of the saint and chevalier, And with the Scarlet Tunic wed ! Mount Royal's crown upon thy head ; And past thy footstool, broad and clear, St. Lawrence sweeping to the sea : Keign on, majestic Ville-Marie ! " Sometimes their fancy lingers over the vanished tribes of the Iroquois, Algonquin, Chippewa, and Sioux, whose recollection lives in the musical nomenclature of Canada " The memory of the Red Man, It lingers like a spell On many a storm-swept headland, On many a leafy dell; Where Tusket's thousand islets, Like emeralds, stud the deep ; Where Blomidon, a sentry grim, His endless watch doth keep. It dwells round Catalon's blue lake, 'Mid leafy forests hid Round fair Discourse, and the rushing tides Of the turbid Pisiquid. And it lends, Chebogue, a touching grace To thy softly flowing river, As we sadly think of the gentle race That has passed away for ever." Constantly, too, the glories of the great St. Law- rence load the verse and fascinate the imagination of the youthful and, so far, little-known singers of the Dominion. Miss K. L. Jones has an excellent ode to the mighty stream, which thus concludes 54 SEAS AND LANDS. " Stretching her arms to the world, Glad, as a maid to her lover ; Coyly, with banners unfurled, Welcoming argosies over ; Wearied, her life's journey done, Grateful to God, the life-giver, Her goal on the ocean's breast won, Rests the great river." And, again, speaking of the old pioneers " He told them of the river, whose mighty current gave Its freshness for three hundred leagues to ocean's briny wave; He told them of the glorious scene presented to his sight, What time he reared the cross and crown on Hochelaga's height ; And of the fortress cliff, that keeps of Canada the key ; And they welcomed back Jacques Cartier from the perils of the It would give many a hard-working head of a family in England new and good ideas to read some of these joyous and free Canadian songs, even when they are not of the highest poetic art ; for always they breathe the spirit of happy independence, and of a life lived face to face with Nature, who pays honest toil in this large land with almost certain prosperity and comfort. "Here's the road!" cries Mr. A. M'Lachlan, under title of ACRES OF YOUR OWN. " Here's the road to independence 1 "Who would bow and dance attendance ? Who, with e'er a spark of pride, While the bush is wild and wide, Would be still a hanger-on, Begging favours from a throne, While beneath yon smiling sun Farms, by labour, can be won 1 ? NIAGARA. 55 Up ! be stirring, be alive, Get upon a farm and thrive ! He's a king upon his throne Who has acres of his own ! " Enoi^gh has now been written to prove that Canada has produced agreeable and accomplished singers, male and female, as well as lumber and grain, cattle and canned salmon. Yet one word more must be said in reference to the French por- tion of the population, who have a pretty native minstrelsy of their own, best studied in M. Ernest Gagnon's " Chansons Populaires du Canada." But here, too, information must be drawn from Mr. Lighthall's excellent volume, which deals sympa- thetically with the topic. The number of the little French lilts floating in the air of Lower Canada is incalculable. One, almost universal, is "A la Claire Fontaine." " From the little child of seven years up to the man of silver hair, all the people in Canada know and sing the ' Claire Fontaine.' One is not French- Canadian without that." In Normandy they have a similar chanson, but the air, which here is mono- tonous but attractive, is different. The original commences thus " A la claire fontaine M'en allant promener, J'ai trouv^ 1'eau si belle Que je m'y suis baigne." Then there comes a charming little chorus " Lui ya longtemps que je t'aime Jamais je ne t'oublierai." 56 SEAS AND LANDS. Ma mi-e ! 'Ya longtemps que je t'aime Jamais je ne t'oublierai." One verse thus addresses the nightingale t " Chante, rossignol, chante, Toi qui as le coeur gai, Tu as le coeur a rire Moi, je l'ai-t-a pleurer. Lui ya longtemps que je t'aime ; Jamais je ne t'oublierai." " C'est la Belle Franpoise " is a livelier but very common Quebec song " C'est la belle Francoise, bon gai, C'est la belle Francoise, Qui veut s'y marier, ma luron, lurette, Qui veut s'y marier, ma luron, lure." The lover goes on to comfort her with a promise to marry her on his return from the war, " Si j'y suis respectd," ending always with the flippant " Ma luron, lurette ; ma luron, lure ! " Several belong particularly to the raftsmen and lumberers of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. Such is " Via 1'bon vent, v'la 1'joli vent Via 1'bon vent, ma mie m'appelle, Via 1'bon vent, v'la 1'joli vent, Via 1'bon vent, ma mie m'attend." Sung from a huge raft, with shanties on it, descend- ing one of these broad open rivers, by the rough and jolly crew, this has a genuine inspiration of free life about it. Of a wild character, too, is " Alouette," whose very beautiful air has made it a favourite NIAGARA. 57 college song. The gaiety of France marks almost all of them ; and this has a touch of humour " ' Ma mignonnette, embrassez-moi.' ' Nenni, Monsieur, je n'oserais, Car si mon papa le savait.' " But who would tell her papa? Why ! " the birds of the woods " " ' Les oiseaux parlent-ils ? ' ' Us parlent frangais, latin aussi.' ' Us parlent fran^ais, latin aussi.' ' He'las, que le monde est malin D'apprendre aux oiseaux le latin ! ' " Lastly, here is a French chanson which prettily repeats the " 'Nobody axed you, sir,' she said" " Qui done gtes-vous, ma charmante, Pour refuser un chevalier ! Quelque dame riche et puissante ? Je suis la fille du meunier. Quoi ! du meunier ! Dieu me pardonne 1 J 'en suis marri pour ton bonheur : Je ne puis t'e"pouser, ma bonne. Qui yous a demand^, seigneur ? " But with this enough and to spare, has been collected to prove that Canada is by no means songless. AT NIAGARA, Sept. 10, 1889. CHAPTER V. AMERICAN SOIL. WASHINGTON has been called, not without reason, "the city of magnificent distances" for its wide, well-paved, interminable vistas of stately buildings and handsome residences of white and grey stone, or red brick, lead the eye everywhere towards a vanishing point. And America herself might well be styled "The land of magnificent distances." The immense network of railroads, everywhere covering the States, seems almost to have abolished the sense of space for this people. They fly about hither and thither without regard for a few hundred miles of journeying more or less, and the stranger within their gates soon learns to share their in- difference to extended locomotion. Moreover, the system of travelling is very good and well-arranged. The American passion for equality will not permit our categories of first, second, and third class ; but there exists on all trains a " parlour car," for which a moderate excess fare is paid to a special conductor, and while this is practically a first-class carriage by day, at night it develops, under the skilful necro- mancy of the " coloured person " charged with this duty, into a series of entirely commodious sleeping 58 AMERICAN SOIL. 61 berths, stretched in one of which the traveller slumbers well enough through the dark hours. If of a nervous temperament, he may shudder to observe that the rails are merely fastened down with staple-heads to the sleepers ; but, on the other hand, these sleepers are very thickly planted in the ballast, and the fish-joints are strong and good. The American luggage system, as is generally known, is perfect in its way. So soon as you have " checked " your impedimenta by seeing the official hitch brass tickets upon the several boxes and trunks, the exact duplicates of which he hands to you, all care is over. As you approach your destination an " express-man," perambulating the long carriage, will make note of your hotel, or residence, take the brass tickets, for which he hands you a receipt, and your belongings will then be delivered almost as quickly as the carriage or omnibus can deposit yourself. Under such arrange- ments it was not fatiguing or difficult to make the run from Niagara Falls to Washington, something like 550 miles in distance. The first portion of this journey was performed in daylight, and re- vealed a district resembling the Ontario region, and naturally enough, since this part of New York State lies along the southern shore of the lake. But you could note a difference between the comparatively old settlements and the new, by the absence of tree stumps from the fields, and the fact that those fields were everywhere being manured for the autumn and winter sowings, a 6i SEAS AND LANDS. necessity to which Canada, with her unexhausted soil, has not yet generally come. Our train ran along the Erie Canal by Rochester, famous for flour-mills and spirit-rapping ; by Canan- daigua, known for its pretty lake, 16 miles in length ; by Elmira, busy in manufacturing steel rails and boilers for locomotives, and Troy, which hardly evokes the reminiscences of its classical namesake. Night fell as we entered the picturesque valley of the Susquehanna River and ran down by the deep Seneca Lake, and its still stream glittering under an almost full moon. Harrisburg, enshrining the name and memory of one John Harris, who founded it in 1735, was traversed shortly after midnight, and with dawn we came into a region familiarised by recollections of the Secession War, for here lay Hanover, with the dreadful field of Gettysburg not far off", and York, reached about 6 A.M. on the southern border of Pennsylvania situated upon Cordorus Creek, which was occupied for some time by the Confederate Army. Shortly afterwards the train entered Maryland, the coloured population largely increasing by this time in the villages and farms on either side of the track. At Baltimore, where the Patapsco River approaches Chesapeake Bay, and makes the well-known port, there was a stop for breakfast, and then we ran forty-four miles in forty-eight minutes into the administrative capital of the United States, the very handsome and agree- able city of Washington. In point of public gardens, parks, and trees, AMERICAN SOIL. 63 planted along the streets, Washington is specially and nobly embellished. Planes, sycamores, limes, chestnuts, and American elms, set in double rows along almost every thoroughfare, give the city a green and umbrageous beauty hardly seen elsewhere. It seems a pity that such charming boulevards and avenues should be distinguished merely by letters of the alphabet, and the cross streets only numbered. In regard of civic and urban nomenclature, however, the American imagination appears to have recoiled in despair from the task of christening towns and streets, and while the latter are lettered and numbered, the former either reproduce a foreign title Syracuse. Utica, Ithaca, Cairo, Delhi, and the like or preserve an old Indian word, or glorify some otherwise forgotten citizen. Yet, already, historical recollections, sombre and glorious, are numerous enough about Washington to suggest appellations for her spacious ways. Take only the quarter where these lines are written, that of the Arlington Hotel. We occupy the apartments where Charles Summer passed the closing days of his patriotic life. Near at hand, at the corner of the park, stands the little red house where the assassins tried to kill Minister Seward on the same night when President Lincoln was done to death. Not far off is the railway station in which President Garfield received a mortal wound from his cruel murderer the spot is de- signated by a silver star let into the floor of the waiting-room and the statues of Jackson, of Farra- 64 SEAS AND LANDS. gut, and other heroes of the Republic gleam through the leaves of the maple trees, and might most worthily give names to the wide ways adjoining. In the same vicinity is a whole group of noble buildings, including the Treasury, the Pension Office, and the War, Navy, and State Departments. Far and wide over the green expanse of the city tower the dome of the Capitol, and the tall obelisk built up to the imperishable memory of George Washington ; while the " White House " where I have just had the honour of a special audience and a very interesting conversation with President Harrison rises near the Treasury, the heart and centre of the Great Commonwealth. The simplicity of American State is well illus- trated by the utter absence of any formality or ceremony in and about the precincts of the official abode of the President. The Executive Mansion, or " White House," stands west of the splendid edifice of the Treasury. It is in the Ionic style, having several porticoes. The fa9ade is 170 feet long, and is occupied on the ground floor by the reception and representation rooms. On the upper floors are the offices and private apartments of the President. Its foundation-stone was laid in 1792, and the first President who tenanted it was Adams, in 1800. In 1814 it was burned by the English, but was rebuilt in 1818. The grounds, which are laid out in gardens, occupy about seventy-five acres, of which twenty are railed in as the President's private demesne. AMERICAN SOIL. 67 Here, then, is the central spot of this vast Republic, the very adytum of its civic life, and yet no guard of honour, no sentinel, no sign of special import, not even a Washington police- man, marks its character, or protects the gate- way. Anybody may enter; everybody who wishes does enter in carriage, hack-cab, or on foot and will no more be questioned in passing through the gardens and mounting the marble steps than if it were an American Army and Navy Store. True, there is an usher, in evening dress, at the door, but he seems put there merely to open and shut it for the convenience of citizens, who do not even take off their hats on entering unless they please, and unless the weather be very sultry. These, however, must at least wait for an audience until the President has finished with his morning council, except on certain days of the week, when he descends to the corridor, and shakes hands with all who like to grasp the presidential palm. This corridor, which is shut off from the hall by a screen of stained glass, has no exceptional grace or grandeur. A score of private houses in London and a hundred hotels in great cities could be named which would dwarf it to insignificance. Indifferently lighted, it conceals rather than reveals the portraits of the bygone presidents and wives of presidents suspended in gilt frames along the wall. From this corridor open three principal rooms. The first is the " Green Parlour," a moderate-sized apartment, with green furniture and hangings, where you see 68 SEAS AND LANDS. the kindly, rugged features of Abraham Lincoln, Jackson's strong countenance, and Washington's well-known face among the pictures. Next to this is the "Blue Parlour," an oval "piece," small, but not inelegant ; and thirdly, the " Red Dining Room." At the back of these is a ball or reception salon, comely, but not costly, nor in the least degree magnificent. Above are chambers which hold the attention more. One is that in which President Lincoln habitually held his councils, and from the bow-window you look far away over the pretty gardens and the park to the glimmering current of the Potomac and the distant uplands of Virginia. How often in the great and fateful war must the gaze of " honest Abe " have wandered southward towards Richmond, which his armies were not able to reach for three long and bloody years. I seemed to feel the shadow of that prodigious anxiety still lingering about the beautiful . prospect in all those heavy masses of gloom cast on the sward by the maples, and all those dark patches falling from the flying clouds. Moreover, in this apartment, at this very plain green table, sitting in this same old- fashioned and common-looking arm-chair, the good captain and leader of his people signed the memor- able Proclamation which for ever broke the fetters of the slave, and redeemed at one noble stroke the glory of the conflict, and the much-suffering negro. Crowds of the joyous, pleasant, chatty negroes are passing under the historic window. Washington is as full of them as a strawberry garden is of black- AMERICAN SOIL. 69 birds ; and the plain chamber seemed indeed to become a temple, and its air to be full of the true incense of the golden " thurifers " of liberty, when one reflected upon the victory of the great and free nation over its first historical danger, and upon that epoch-making decree which "ransomed the African." A few steps lead from Abraham Lincoln's cus- tomary council chamber to an inner official apartment, where at this hour President Harrison was sitting in debate with certain of his Ministers. On receiving my card he did me the signal honour to receive me at once in the inner Council Chamber. Rising from a group of Secretaries of State, the President approached with a cordial welcome to Washington on his lips a courteous, kindly, shrewd, and busi- ness-stamped gentleman, of middle height or less, with light hair, beginning to " catch the snow," simple in style as were his surroundings. After some very friendly words, our dialogue took some such shape as this : " You are pleased, I hope, with the States ? " "Who could fail to be pleased, Mr. President, having eyes to see and mind to appreciate ? Any reasonable Englishman must be proud and glad, I think, to be able to wander over so splendid a country, and never feel himself otherwise than at home in this your Transatlantic England." " We know you have always been and are a true friend to America." " I consider myself half an American. Two of 70 SEAS AND LANDS. my children bear the American names of ' Emerson ' and ' Channing ; ' my late wife was an American. I represent in a very humble way the bond of blood and language which I hope will grow ever stronger and closer between the countries." " We hope that, too, most sincerely ; and my son, who has just returned from England, assures me that good-will and good-wishes towards America are more and more felt in England." "I venture to say, sir, that that is so. A con- stantly increasing number of Englishmen and I trust and believe of Americans also ardently hope that no question will ever again arise between us which cannot and will not be settled by Reason and by Right the only proper arbiters between two such peoples." " That ought to be so, and will be so, if we make proper mutual allowances for each other. What has impressed you chiefly in your journeys here ? " " The ' magnificent distances/ Mr. President ! I see a large terrestrial globe standing by your chair. It makes me think rather ruefully of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' line, when he describes the Western giant as 'Twirling the spotted globe to find us.' " " Ah ! we do not measure Great Britain by her acres ! She also is really so large that we never could have remained under one Government even if the War of Independence had not happened." " Yes ! Still it is sad to think that that stupid AMERICAN SOIL. 71 affair of the Boston Tea Chests was caused by a majority of a single vote in the House of Commons." " Well, if we had remained one people geographi- cally, you would have had to be governed from Washington, perhaps ; since we are preponderant in numbers and area." "As to that, sir, you must put Canada and our Colonies in the scale, and India. However, I hope that, together, England and America will some day dictate peace, in the interests of universal humanity, to the world, and that the language of Shakespeare will become that of the globe." President Harrison smiled, and said gently he hoped such a day would arrive ; whereupon, after some further general remarks, the pleasant inter- view terminated. Yet, if the White House is modest in its own character and in that also of its distinguished occu- pants who address Emperors and Kings as " my good friend," and are so addressed by them the Capitol is grand enough even for the great Republic. Among the many imposing buildings of Washington, this huge edifice is the handsomest and largest in the town, and, indeed, on the whole American Continent. It is situated on Capitol Hill, a mile from the Potomac River, and has a length over all of 750 feet, with a depth of 120 feet, and wings of 140 feet. It covers an area of 3^ acres. The materials used are light yellow stone for the centre, and white marble for the wings. The buildings face eastwards. In front of them stretches a wide 72 SEAS AND LANDS. space, and beyond is a well-] aid-out park. The structure was commenced in 1821, and the wings were added to it in 1851. The corner-stone of the structure was laid by Daniel Webster. It was finished, inclusive of the new dome, in 1865, at a cost of 15,000,000 dollars. The main front is orna- mented with three grand porticoes of Corinthian columns. The centre is approached by a flight of stairs, embellished with statues by Persico and Greenough. On the esplanade towers the colossal statue of Washington. The building is surmounted by a lofty iron dome, on which stands a statue of Liberty, 19^ feet high. Tall marble statues are to the right and left of the entrance. You enter through bronze doors, evidently imitated from those of Ghiberti, at Florence, into the Eotunda. These doors illustrate the life of Columbus and the dis- covery of America. The Rotunda is 96 feet wide and 1 08 feet in height. Marble bas-reliefs over the doors and paintings on the wall illustrate American history. The dome rises finely above, with a painted frieze and pierced clere-stories. Through the western door of the Rotunda, and at the end of that corridor, is the Congress Library in three large halls, all thoroughly fireproof. They contain, people said, above 650,000 books, pamphlets, brochures, &c. The north door of the Rotunda leads into the Senate House ; semicircular, commodious, practical in every detail. But in the corridor is the door leading into the Supreme Court, the highest tribunal in America. The Chamber of the Senate is 114 feet by 82 feet, AMERICAN SOIL. 73 and 36 feet in height ; an iron roof with stained lights, and galleries seating 1000 citizens. But the Supreme Court most interests the in- telligent stranger. Here is the real " omphalos " of the Republic, the metacentre which keeps the Ship of State balanced on a safe keel, the Power which is above State-rights, Congress, Senate, and all. Persons who rashly quote the federation of the Sovereign States of America as a precedent for all sorts of perilous experiments with older institutions in other lands forget this Supreme Court, which keeps the stars of the Spangled Banner together by a force akin to gravitation, silent, secret, and irresistible. It is easier to admire that great inven- tion of the fathers of the Republic than to imitate it elsewhere. Meantime, it is somewhat trying for a patriotic Englishman to wander round the ample floor of the Rotunda of the Washington Capitol. The pictures adorning its walls recall principally British disasters. Here is my Lord Cornwallis, in scarlet and gold, sadly surrendering his sword ; and there Commodore Perry is gaily and gallantly sinking His Majesty's ships upon Lake Erie ; and elsewhere you shall gaze on the untoward incidents of Ticonde- roga and Lexington Ford. It cannot be denied that a promenade about the halls and corridors of the imposing structure, where the American eagle keeps its legislative eyrie, is calculated to convey the sensation known here as ''twisting the tail of the British Lion." Under the auspices of General Greely, of Arctic 74 SEAS AND LANDS. fame the hero of the desperate adventure in the icy North I visited what is called " the Signal Office," where the meteorological work of the States is done. Here supervised and harmonised by the General- come together those reports from all parts of the Continent, which enable the "clerks of the weather," employed by Brother Jonathan, to send word of those storms which come only too often upon our shores across the Atlantic. The system, and its equipments and appliances, are creditably complete, and we were able to trace the history of a storm which had just ravaged the eastern seaboard, from its birthplace in the West Indian islands to its howling disappear- ance off Cape Cod. Telegraphic communication with Bermuda is greatly needed to make the net- work of " storm -catchers " complete. That effected, mariners, farmers, and the world in general would almost always know what kind of time was coming. The institution possesses a perfect record of the weather all over the continent of North America during the past fifteen years. It ought to be de- nominated the " Temple of the Winds." WASHINGTON, Sept. 12, 1889. CHAPTER VI. MEN AND CITIES. FROM Washington to Philadelphia is an easy run through the green country drained into Chesapeake Bay by many sylvan streams. Heavy rains had flooded the low-lying farmsteads around Baltimore and northward so that many fields of maize, tomato, and melon were lying drowned in the too abundant tribute of the Delaware and its confluent channels. The negro population which rapidly diminishes as you come north from Mary- land looked positively " blue-black " in the chilly weather and amongst the damp enclosures. There are plenty of coloured waiters and " helps," of course, at the North ; but the sun-loving Sambo is evidently much depayse there, and naturally gravitates to the warmer States. What will be the future of that vast dark alien population forms one of the great puzzling problems for the American Republic. From time to time sanguinary collisions between blacks and whites occur, and the diminishing number of half-breeds proves that "miscegenation" will never prevail to settle the matter. Immensely fecund among them- selves, although unskilful in rearing children, the 75 76 SEAS AND LANDS. sons of Ham are seriously multiplying in the South, where in some districts they quite swamp the white vote. Will they absorb and altogether possess certain regions? Will there some day happen a Black Exodus to Africa, or to Mexico, or to South America ? Free as birds, lazy as pigs, joyous as crickets, the negroes darken all the South with their political presence, and enliven it by their inborn cheerfulness. What an army another Tous- saint TOuverture might raise among them with which to conquer an Ebony Kingdom on the Gold Coast ! Philadelphia is a truly splendid city, and covers more ground than New York, Chicago, or any of its greatest sisters. There are 950 miles of paved streets there, the busiest and longest being " Market," up and down which, while London is merely talk- ing about "electric cars," those vehicles, silently and safely propelled by batteries, daily carry scores of thousands of citizens. Nor have we anywhere in England a Town Hall nearly as magnificent as the huge pile of white marble, reared in Re- naissance style, which is called " The Public Buildings," and glorifies the corner of Broad and Market Streets. It contains the municipal offices, law courts, &c., and measures 486^ feet by 470 feet, being almost a square, while its tower when completed will be 535 feet high. It covers an area of about 4^ acres, without including the court- yard in the centre of 200 feet square. Girard College is another magnificent building of white MEN AND CITIES. 77 marble, in the Corinthian style, imitating the Par- thenon at Athens, erected out of Stephen Girard's munificent gift of 2,000,000 dollars to provide gratuitous instruction and support for destitute orphans. Theology is rigorously excluded from its lectures, and no clergyman, priest, or missionary is allowed to set foot within it, according to the testamentary conditions of the founder. In La3titia Street is Penn's cottage, built before Penn's arrival in the settlement, and truly the historic Quaker might be proud of the city sprung up around it. In a court on the south side of Chestnut Street is Carpenters' Hall, the meeting- place of the first Congress- of the United Colonies ; but Independence Hall, between Fifth and Sixth Streets, is justly considered the most interesting building in Philadelphia. It has brilliant historical associations, and several of the rooms contain still the very furniture of the time when the Declara- tion of Independence was there made. In front of it stands Bailey's statue of Washington, and at the back is Independence Square, laid out as a small park. All these, and many other notable sights in the Pennsylvanian capital, we had the good fortune to study, under the auspices of one of the best known, as he is also one of the most public- spirited and liberal of Philadelphian citizens Mr. G. W. Childs, proprietor of the Public Ledger, a journal eminent amid its contemporaries not alone for literary talent and political independence, 7 8 SEAS AND LANDS. but for a dignity and propriety in tone and in con- tents by no means universal among the American press. For twenty years the bosom friend and neighbour of Ulysses S. Grant the famous soldier- President of the Republic Mr. Childs enjoys an influence natural to his experience, wealth, and patriotism, and it was no secret that Mr. Wana- maker, now the Postmaster-General in President Harrison's Cabinet, and proprietor of the most immense "universal providing store" even in the States, owed his portfolio largely to this gentle- man's recommendations. The astounding establish- ment of the Minister employs 4000 hands, covers 1 8^ acres of ground, and is worked by the most elaborate organisation. It must be almost a re- laxation, indeed, after governing " Wanamaker's," at Philadelphia, to take in hand the business of conducting " Uncle Sam's " postal system. Yet it was not to any superb public edifice, or to any famed historical spot, or even to Wanamaker's, the mighty and manifold where a whole hall, full of revolving wheels and flying wires, was buzzing with countless cartridges of money coming up, and of endless change going down to none of these were my earliest steps bent on arriving in Phila- delphia. In a suburb of the city, called Camden, beyond the broad Delaware, which, with the Schuyl- kill, or " Hidden Stream," bathes her long wharfs, resides that original and grandly gifted poet, Walt Whitman, assuredly one of the chief personages of American literature in his own strange and unre- PHILADELPHIA : INDEPENDENCE HALL. MEN AND CITIES. 81 strained, albeit most musical and majestic style. It is held, no doubt, in some quarters an eccentricity to admire Walt Whitman ; in others even an im- propriety ; but it may be doubted if those who so lightly dub this Tyrtseus of America "rugged" or "immoral" have really read, with close and due study, his remarkable pages, or are competent to judge of the finest and most daring ranges of poetic art. To him who writes these words, the Poet of "Drum-Taps" and of "The Voyage to India" has long seemed a singer nobly and perfectly native to the New World, profoundly philosophical, and one to be certainly regarded with reverence and affec- tion, for his humanity, his insight, his faith, his courage, and the clear, sonorous, and ofttimes ex- quisite melody of his rhymeless, but never un- rhythmical, dithyrambs. No living singer has ever composed any English lines more divinely musical than those of the " Invocation," which begin, " Come, lovely and soothing Death." No poet- philosopher has ever proclaimed loftier veracities of life and religion than could be gleaned, thickly and richly, from " The Leaves of Grass ; " and, as to the charge of impropriety, it is often made by people who have not understood his main thesis and state- ment, " I swear I am no more ashamed of the body than I am ashamed of the soul." At all events, for me Walt Whitman has long appeared the embodiment of the spirit of American growth and glory the natural minstrel of her splendid youth the chief modern perceiver of the I 82 SEAS AND LANDS. joy and gladness in existence too long forgotten or forbidden ; and, of all men in Philadelphia, he it' was whom I most desired to see and to thank for my own share, at least, in the comfort and wisdom of his verse, which, for one who can read it with sympathy, has the freshness of the morning wind blowing in the pines, the sweetness of the sea-air tumbling the wave-crests. You go down the long Market Street in an electric car, which is driven from a wire overhead, the connector-rod and the wheels emitting flashes of blue fire all the way, which seem, however, to do nobody any harm. These novel tramcars are checked, stopped, and started again with the utmost certainty by a button and a string, and the over- head wire illuminates the vehicle as well as drives it. Arrived at the edge of the Delaware River by the aid of this yoked and tamed lightning, a pro- digious ferry-steamer receives passengers, carts, wag- gons anything and everything and puffs across to the other bank, amid multitudinous small and large craft. Here is New Jersey, where, for a while, nobody could be found who knew the habitat of America's lyric veteran. But at last, an ancient flyman was discovered who was acquainted with the abode of "the old poet," and many a winding way and devious plank-road brought us in the end to an obscure street, where our modern Tyrta3us re- sided. The humble tenement which represented the poet's "bower" stood between two retail stores, MEN AND CITIES. 83 and was about the most unlikely spot in the world to search in for a bard. Yet a sweet-voiced woman, darning stockings and swinging to and fro in a rocking-chair, assured me that " Mr. Whitman " was truly within, and a very handsome brown-faced boy of nineteen in shirt-sleeves volunteered to call him. Soon the famous dithyrambist descended the stairs, clad in a light holland coat, with open shirt ruffled in the neck, walking very lamely with the help of a stick, but certainly one of the most beautiful old men ever beheld, with his clear keen eyes, sculptured profile, flowing silver hair and beard, and mien of lofty content and independence. In a very few minutes, I may venture to say, we were like old friends. I told him how he was honoured and comprehended by many and many an Englishman, who knew how to distinguish great work from little, in ancient or modern tongues. I told him how many among us found the freedom of the broad prairie and the freshness of the sea in his pages, and loved them for their large humanity and superb forecasts of human development. The handsome youth fetched down the " Leaves of Grass " from upstairs, and we read together some of the lines most in mind, the book lying upon the old poet's knee, his large and shapely hand resting on mine. The sweet-voiced woman dropped her darning needle to join in the lyrical and ami- cable chat, the handsome boy lounged and listened at the doorway, a big setter laid his soft muzzle on the master's arm, and the afternoon grew to evening 84 SEAS AND LANDS. in pleasant interchange of thoughts and feelings. He laughed joyously at the vastness and vitality of this Republic, of which I admiringly spoke, and said, " Yes, we are truly as they say West very ' numerious.' ' " But have you reverence enough among your people ? " I asked. " Do the American children respect and obey their parents sufficiently, and are the common people grateful enough to their best men, their statesmen, leaders, teachers, poets, and ' betters ' generally ? " "Allons, camarade!" Walt Whitman replied; "your old world has been soaked and saturated in reverentiality. We are laying here in America the basements and foundation rooms of a new era. And we are doing it, on the whole, pretty well and substantially. By-and-by, when that job is through, we will look after the steeples and pinnacles." He bade me " give his love to the boys in London," such as cared for him. Some of them, he said, had been " very good to him in past days, and had pulled him out of a quagmire." But there was no tone of complaint in his cheery manliness, and he looked the picture of self-content and happy old age. In a strong round hand he inscribed my name in the volume we had discussed, gave me some precious pictures of himself at different epochs of his life, and bade me farewell with an affectionate warmth which will never be forgotten. A short run carries the wanderer northwards from Philadelphia to New York ; but long before Jersey MEN AND CITIES. 85 City is reached, the lines of frame tenements abutting on the woodlands and marshes tell of the proximity of the great city. It is not necessary to say anything about the vast, noisy, restless, stately, business Metro- polis of the Republic, with which so many are perfectly well acquainted. Paved everywhere with cobble-stones, riddled below by tramways, and above by " elevated " railways, pierced and permeated with electric wires, and full all day and all night of rattling, pounding, ponderous cars, waggons, and cabs, New York City is the least reposeful place in the world, and wants wood-pavement everywhere, if sleep be necessary to human existence. The only quiet spots observed in Manhattan were those about the handsome and tasteful Central Park, whose green knolls and shady uplands look prettily and pleasantly enough upon the Hudson River gliding down from West Point and the Palisades. On one of the most commanding points of this well-ordered park, whence the eye could range far over the roofs and towers of the city in one direc- tion, and away to the hills and the country in the other, we found the grave of Ulysses Grant, under the fluttering Stars and Stripes, guarded by a limping veteran of the Federal Army. The chest or "casket," containing the remains of the re- nowned General and President foremost among those who saved the Republic could be discerned through the gilded bars of the little mausoleum. It was nearly hidden in a mound of funeral wreaths of honour, but showed the name and date of demise 86 SEAS AND LANDS. of the illustrious soldier. It is the intention oi the New York citizens to raise an imposing monu- ment here to the immortal memory of Grant, and the necessary funds have already been collected by public subscription. It was my good fortune to make at New York the close acquaintance of another, and hardly less re- nowned soldier of the Republic, General Sherman since, alas ! dead ; nor could any conversations have been more interesting than those in which he did me the honour to describe and discuss, among many other matters, that wonderful and memorable march led by him, which pierced the Confederate States like the thrust of a rapier, and helped largely to bring about the collapse of "Secession." The General was evidently and justly discontented with certain criti- cisms which have appeared in England, from a high military source, upon the conduct of the campaign. "We had," he said, "to create armies before we could use them in the established and scientific way, and it is unfair and illogical to judge the first two years of our war as if we had been commanding trained and seasoned troops. In the third year we had regiments to lead as good and skilled as com- manding officers could ask for ; and to the move- ments then made, the rules of military science may be properly applied." General Sherman spoke of the quality of courage in soldiers, and men generally, distinguishing it impatiently from brutish and irrational recklessness. " True courage," he said, " is founded on presence MEN AND CITIES. 87 of mind. The man who, in the face of imminent peril, can hold up his hand, and count the fingers on it quite calmly, is the brave, self-possessed, serviceable individual. Moreover, true courage goes with unselfishness. I have seen an officer fight on unflinchingly in my presence, bleeding from many wounds, of which he was disdainfully heedless, and, in later life, have witnessed the same gentle- man turn deadly white while he held the hand of his child, that a surgeon might operate for some trifling abscess." Many were the thrilling episodes and adventures of the great war which fell in fas- cinating recital from the lips of General Sherman, but they are either recorded in the pages of his autobiography, or are too long and discursive to set down here. One little flash of humour is, perhaps, worth preserving from all the war talk which we enjoyed. "General Thomas," said he, "junior to me in rank, but senior in service, was a stern discipli- narian. He had received many complaints about the pilfering and plundering committed by one of his brigades, and, being resolved to put this offence down, he issued some very strict orders, menacing with death any who should transgress. The brigade in question wore for its badge an acorn, in silver or gold, and the men were inordinately proud of this distinctive sign. Several cases of disobedience had been reported to the General, but the evidence was never strong enough for decisive action ; until one day, riding with an orderly down 88 SEAS AND LANDS. a by-lane outside the posts, Thomas came full upon an Irishman, who, having laid aside his rifle, with which he had killed a hog, was busily engaged in skinning the animal with his sword-bayonet, so as to make easy work with the bristles, &c., before cooking some pork-chops. "'Ah,' cried the General, 'you rascal! at last I have caught one of you in the act. There is no mistake about it this time, and I will make an example of you, sir ! ' " ' Bedad ! General, honey ! ' said the Irishman, straightening himself up and coming to the salute, ' it's not shootin' me that you ought to be afther, at all, at all, but rewardin' me.' " * What do you mean, sir ? ' exclaimed General Thomas. " * Why, your honour ! ' the soldier replied, ' this disperate baste here had just been disicratin' the rigimental badge ; and so I was forced to despatch 'urn. It's 'atin the acorns that J found him at ! ' Even General Thomas was obliged to laugh at this, and the soldier saved his life by his wit." General Sherman spoke with much attachment of many English officers, his friends, and recalled with evident pleasure the receptions he had met with in English garrisons at Gibraltar, Malta, and elsewhere. Albeit then verging on his seventieth year, the illustrious leader appeared perfectly hale, strong, and almost fit, if necessary, for another such campaign, as when, at the head of that tough and fearless column of Federal troops, he disappeared from MEN AND CITIES. 89 sight at Atlanta, to turn up again, irresistible and victorious, under the ramparts of Savannah, which fell to him without a shot, crowning the perfect success of the memorable march. NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 1889. CHAPTEK VII. BOSTON. MASSACHUSETTS, Connecticut, Vermont, and the sea- board States comprising New England, well deserve that name in regard of good harbours, busy coasts, and beautiful inland scenery. In leaving New York for Boston by what is called the " The Air-Line Railway," the traveller journeys along the northern shore of Long Island Sound, and passes through a score of towns and " cities " with very familiar names, such as Chester, Stamford, Southport, Bridge- port, Milford, and New Haven. This last is an important centre, full of dark-foliaged trees, which have given it the title of " Elm City," and famous as containing numerous educational institutions, among which is Yale College, not so old as Harvard and not so richly endowed, but enjoying a well-merited reputation. It was founded in 1700 It has over 100 professors, its students number- ing over 1000. It has a School of Fine Arts, a Law School, a Medical, Theological, Scientific, and Academic Department ; and its buildings cover, including ornamental grounds, over nine acres, among the most important of them being the Library, with over 140,000 volumes. Situated at BOSTON. 91 the head of New Haven Bay, the largest town in Connecticut and a port of entry, New Haven is a great railway centre, and has a considerable home and foreign commerce, principally with the West Indies. Its manufactures are in the hardware line, jewellery, and indiarubber. When the railroad diverges from it, we plunge into a charming country 7 on the way to Hartford and Willimantic, a country resembling that around Kendal and Ambleside, with folded verdant hills, pretty lakes and lakelets shut within them, and streams or rivers which shine as they wind under the dark fir woods, or emerge into the valleys decked with maple and birch, just now beginning to put on their autumn glory of burning colours. As we ascend, glimpses are again obtained of Long Island Sound, and of many a smart-looking schooner two, three, and even four masted in the construction of which American shipbuilders excel. Everywhere the " golden-rod," covering the clear- ings with its spikes of bright blossom ; everywhere the sumach, with dark-purple seed-vessels and crimson leaves ; everywhere the frame-houses, gaily painted in blue and red and saffron, with " piazzas " and well-filled barns ; everywhere, apparently, ac- tivity and prosperity, a region this Yankee-land of solid well-being. Then we arrive at Boston " Hub of the Uni- verse " most English-like of all the cities of the Eastern States, and in the highest degree a plea- sant, fair, cultured, and stately city. Its lower and business portions, indeed, curiously resemble those 92 SEAS AND LANDS. of many a large place in its old namesake ; but the suburbs are prettier, and more tastefully laid out and built than almost any in England. Brookline, especially, and the long vistas of villas leading to Cambridge, and thence to Mt. Auburn and along the Charles River, have a singular charm by reason of the variety in the style of the residences half stone or brick, and half wood which are planted on well- kept lawns, not shut out from the public road by iron railings or walls, as with us, but quite open, and presenting the most charming diversity of design and colouring. The passenger traffic of the city is all done by cars mainly electric which hiss and rattle along, always crowded, emitting as they go sparks of white light from their rumbling wheels, and from the conducting-rod which runs against the overhead wire. For five cents you may ride any- where, but there is no law against overfilling, and the chances are that you will have to stand up all the way. Far and wide above the great city shines the gilded dome of the State House, 1 1 6 feet high ; and nobody who notices its happy effect, overhanging the roofs like a perpetual sun, could doubt of the excellent result which would be achieved if London were to cover with gold-leaf the far more majestic dome of St. Paul's. " Boston Common," just underneath the State House, is really a fine but small park and ornamental garden, upon which Beacon Street looks, with an aspect irresistibly recalling the familiar front of Piccadilly and the Green Park at home. BOSTON. 93 No handsomer group of buildings, hotels, and fine mansions can well be seen, than where Boylston Street opens out in front of the Museum of Fine Arts ; and there is a graceful climbing plant the Ampelopsis which drapes almost every church, public edifice, and private abode with its bright green trails of thick verdure changing to a rich russet and purple as "the Fall" approaches. North of the spacious city soars into the sky the ugly granite obelisk, marking Bunker Hill, on the site of the battle fought June 17, 1775, the only monument, perhaps, ever raised to commemorate a defeat ; for it is matter of history, as is well con- ceded in Dr. Oliver W. Holmes' delightful ballad, " Grandmother's Story," that the British gained all the honours of the day in that memorable con- flict. The most beautiful of the many cemeteries round about is undoubtedly Mount Auburn, with its winding walks thronged by the tombstones all the pretty paths named after different flowers ; its glorious views across the Charles River ; its groves of stately trees and parterres of bright blossoms, kept so trimly and piously as to render the spot a veri- table " Garden of Death ; " its galaxy of great names hallowing the air Longfellow, Story, Winthrop, Adams, Channing, Margaret Fuller, Dana, &c. And the most interesting, as well as, on the whole, most picturesque of its suburbs, is, of course, Cambridge, the home of Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and other noted American citizens, and the seat of Harvard University. It was first called Newtown, and settled 94 SEAS AND LANDS. soon after the Boston colony, but subsequently chris- tened Cambridge in honour of the University in England, where John Harvard, the founder of the Uni- versity, and other leaders had studied. Established in 1636 by Rev. John Harvard, and incorporated in 1650, it is the oldest and most richly endowed seat of learning in America. Besides its collegiate de- partment, it has departments for law, medicine, science, art, and theology. It has 220 teachers, and about 1400 students. The University lands com- prise over sixty acres, and contain twenty or more academical buildings, shaded with fine elms and other trees. The noblest is Memorial Hall, in recollection of the students who fell in the War of Secession. It is large and well-proportioned, and 200 feet high. The Great Hall is its principal apartment, 164 feet by 60 feet. In the vestibule are the tablets of the students (136) who died for their country. The Theatre holds 1300 persons. The University Library, a Gothic building known as Gore Hall, in form of a Latin cross, has a groined roof 35 feet high, and possesses about 200,000 books, while the University contains about 100,000 more in other detached halls. The governing body of the University consists of one president and six fellows, and a board 'of overseers, who meet in University Hall. There are forty-seven professorships. The course extends over four years, and the great insti- tution is ruled by a dignitary, Dr. Charles Eliot, super-eminently qualified by his learning, suavity, strength of character, and devotion, for the high BOSTON. 95 charge which he bears amid universal popularity and esteem. It was our privilege to become the guests of President Eliot at his pleasant official abode in the centre of the American Oxford, and in this way a very ample and agreeable acquaintance was made with Harvard men, manners, and systems. But Boston and its environs contained many friends beside, and connections by marriage, who had to be visited ; and there was, moreover, an American wedding at which we had the happiness to assist, peculiar in that it was celebrated within the drawing- room of the house, the very charming bride and her procession of attendants passing between lines gar- landed with flowers, held by little pages, to the grand piano, beside which two clergymen performed the brief rite. There was a festal gathering, too, of " American cousins " extremely gay and cordial to attend ; and one of our earliest days was devoted to a visit to Oak Knoll, Danvers, the residence of the esteemed poet, Whittier. The venerable singer lives in a comfortable and characteristic dwelling, surrounded by a small park, left much as Nature made it, and as the pre- Adamite glaciers chiselled out its dells and hil- locks, which are shaded by large oak, elm, maple, and magnolia trees, amid the boughs of which the American robins pipe, and chipmunks and grey squirrels play. Mr. Whittier is now verging upon eighty years of age, but his tall, lithe figure is still erect, his clear penetrating deep grey-blue eyes 9 6 SEAS AND LANDS. undimmed ;. and albeit shy and reserved by habit, he unbends sweetly and genially to accepted friends. A stuffed bald-headed eagle, mounted as if grasping a small star-spangled banner, testified if that were necessary to his patriotism ; an old tailless sheep- dog, which nestled its muzzle on the master's knee while we talked, to his love of animals. His conversation, which was of the Quaker fashion, full of " thee's and thou's," was pointed, animated, and marked by the felicity of his printed works ; nor can any cultured person need to be told how classic, and lucid, and happy are many of Whittier's best lines. He smiled, half sadly, when I expressed the wish that he could come across the Atlantic to see, under the memorial window to Milton, in St. Margaret's Church at Westminster, his own admirable verse " The New World honours thee, whose lofty plea For England's freedom made her own more sure. Thy page, immortal as its theme, shall be Their common freehold, while the worlds endure." He dropped a bright epigram in the course of our chat. I had been praising Emerson, and lamenting that a great authority known to us both dissented, and compared the Concord philosopher's style in prose to "the shooting forth of stones from a sack." "Ah! but," replied instantly the old poet, "thou knowest well, friend, they are all precious stones." And I was happy enough to obtain an interesting avowal from his lips. He had been speaking of the enduring and gloomy influence of the old-accustomed Puritan doctrines upon the minds of New Englanders, BOSTON. 97 of their pernicious darkening of life and literature, and how that he himself had come under the cloud of Calvinism and its terrors. " But you," I said, " Sir, born in the purple of the Muses, never were, and never could have been a Calvinistic Puritan." " Nay, thou'rt right," he answered ; " the world was much too beautiful and God far too good. I never was of that mind." I made another delightful pilgrimage this time to the shrine of a life-long regard and attachment. We passed a perfectly delightful day at the house of Emerson, in Concord, some twenty miles from Boston, entertained by Dr. Emerson, his son, who closely resembles his illustrious father in lineaments, and Miss Ellen Emerson, his daughter, whose sweet and benign countenance still more completely per- petuates the philosopher's serenity and radiant charm of expression. Judge Hoar, a well-known citizen of Concord, captured us for a time at the Concord Station, and drove us round to see the bridge, where the first musket was fired in the Revolu- tionary war. Is there any spot in ancient or modern lands more replete with sad, and yet lofty recollec- tions, than this where " Th' embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot, heard round the world." You recall the facts ? General Gage, commanding at Boston, had ordered the destruction of stores and guns collected near the river by the malcontents, and a column of some hundreds of British troops G 98 SEAS AND LANDS. marched secretly to Concord to execute the order. They were met and checked at the little stream by a band of American "minute-men" under Major Isaac Bruddick, and, being resisted, they opened fire. The shots wounded a Revolutionary or two, and then Major Bruddick cried out, " Fire, in God's name, fellow-soldiers!" himself discharging his piece. Two British grenadiers fell to the ensuing volley, and that which replied from the King's ranks killed the rebel officer and one Abner Hosmer. The first blood of the struggle had been fatally spilled ; the sorrowful but inevitable conflict had begun. At sound of those unhappy volleys the whole district rose the British column was mobbed, harassed, decimated with ambuscades, as it drew back towards Boston, and must have been destroyed, but for Lord Percy's appearance and succour with 1200 men of the garrison. A bullet-hole in a neighbouring cottage still shows how hot the fight was, and how well these frame-buildings last. The bridge itself now presents the most peaceful sylvan scene imaginable a grove of elm and maple leading to the wooden arches, a placid glittering rural river, and to mark its historical significance only a statue and a grave. The statue, by French, in bronze, spiritedly represents a Concord farmer turning from his plough, flint-lock gun in hand, and with eager, angry look, to the entrance of the bridge. The roadside inscription runs, "Grave of two British soldiers," and I bared my head in respect to those honest victims of a mistaken policy, who died doing their duty as much as George Washington's BOSTON. 99 " minute-men." It was good to hear that when, in 1875, on the centenary of that hapless April iQth, America celebrated "the shot heard round the world," the resting-place of our poor fellow-countrymen was covered with flowers. I am proud to add that those votive blooms were deposited, with the kind approval of the Celebration Committee, by some English workmen of the Waltham Watch Factory. If I could have met these worthy fellows I would have thanked them for all England. We may regret Lord North's policy and the King's obstinacy, but our British soldiers did their devoir, as always, in that quarrel ; now, happily, hard to remember. Hawthorne's house scene of " Mosses from an Old Manse " stands nigh the bridge, and Emerson's is not far away. The rooms in it are kept exactly as the poet-philosopher left them. There are his books, well marked ; the engraving, " Aurora of Guido," given by Carlyle for a marriage present ; the blotting-pad with its latest ink impressions, the horsehair sofa on which he lay nigh to death, the wood-pile, the trees in their branches the " g av > polite titmouse " he immortalised the simple "homely" home, with its low-pitched farmlike apartments and old-world furniture, all sacred and unchanged. I traced in more than one volume of his modest library the footsteps of his serene and radiant mind, especially in the Indian translations. I saw where he had lighted on the passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, which struck him so, " When the red slayer saith, I slay." At dinner it was my ioo SEAS AND LANDS. distinction to conduct to the table and to sit beside his venerable widow, a lady now very aged and infirm, but still retaining marks of the beauty of " Queenie." Mrs. Emerson walks and converses with difficulty, but retains her clearness and sweet- ness of mind. A bouquet of wild blossoms sug- gested the question " What flower of all the garden do you like best?" " Oh, I should be ashamed to give you any other answer, Sir Edwin, except ' The rose. ' " But you know that is the flower, par excellence, of England?" " Well, I do not love it a little bit the less on that account." In fact, this dear old lady was wholly delightful, but did not once speak about her great husband. After the repast we drove in Emerson's " carry-all " through the wild pine-woods to Walden Pond, the spot of all others dearest to his heart, and that where he was accustomed to meditate day after day, trudging the league of sandy road thither and back again. Those who know Emerson's poems will recall the verses " If I could put my woods in song, And tell what's there enjoyed, All men would to my garden throng, And leave the cities void. My garden is a forest ledge, Which older forests bound ; The rocks slope to the blue lake edge, Then plunge to depths profound." BOSTON. 101 It is, in truth, an unique spot, wild as when Red Indians alone trod it, where the deep lakelet slumbers under the boughs of beech, hemlock, and " savage maple," and the solitude-loving Thoreau was content to build himself a hut. We sate under the white pines where Emerson was wont to pass the lonely hours, and then drove the sure-footed American horse up and down neck-breaking wood- land alleys, over tree-stumps and hollows full of wild asters and yellow " touch-me-not," to each point of the sequestered pool which had been his favourite haunts ; and evening came upon us before we could return from the fascinating influences of the place, to the little white wooden house with green shutters consecrated by the genius of America's chief thinker and teacher. One other Boston pilgrimage must be mentioned. On the road from Cambridge to Mount Auburn stands a spacious and comfortable wooden house everything almost is built from the forests in New England looking over fields and gardens towards Brighton, and standing in pleasant grounds. There Washington lived ; and there also Longfellow, the greatest of American poets, dwelt for many a year. By the kind invitation of the poet's daughter the " grave Alice " of his well-known line a happy afternoon hour was passed reading the original MSS. of " Evangeline " and other world-known works, in the exquisitely neat handwriting of the author, in- specting the domestic treasures of his home, the pictures he loved, the pens and desk he used. Here 102 SEAS AND LANDS. was the armchair where he wrote the " Come to me, O my children!" there the "Clock on the Stair" which ticked the " Never ! For ever ! " His portrait, on which a laurel- wreath hung, stood side by side with that of Emerson; and the present gentle mistress of Craigie House told us many a trait and habit of her great and famous father, whose lyrics are to-day on every lip. A handsome girl was among the com- pany a student in the Female Annexe at Harvard from South Carolina. Her father's estate, near Savannah, had been desolated by Sherman's march, of which we spoke. I asked, " Have you all forgiven and forgotten that, and the war, down South?" " We have forgiven," the Southern lady replied, "but we have not forgotten." Going home we crossed the bridge over the Charles River, where were conceived those tender lines beginning, " I stood on the bridge at midnight," and, full of thoughts about the waste of warfare, and the efforts of poets and philosophers to redeem and exalt, the ripples of the salt water seemed to murmur " And, for ever and for ever As long as the river flows, As long as life has passions, As long as life has woes The moon and her broken reflections, And the shadows, shall appear Like the symbol of love in the heavens, And its wavering image here." BOSTON, Sept. 25, 1889. CHAPTER VIII. HARVARD. AN agreeable sojourn in Boston the greater part of it passed under the hospitable roof of the Presi- dent of Harvard University, Dr. Charles W. Eliot enabled me to study with advantage the chief educa- tional centre of the United States. A walk of two miles which may be performed by the electric or the horse car brings you, by busy streets first, and then by pretty villas and gardens, to Harvard Square, in the vicinity of which the buildings of the University congregate. The principal of these, alike architec- turally and in point of interest, is the Memorial Hall, recently erected to commemorate the Harvard students who gave their lives for their country's safety and integrity in the Secession War. This structure of red brick and stone, with a lofty and ornate campa- nile, contains, besides a very large dining-hall and a commodious Theatre for Lectures, &c., a central corridor, imposingly adorned with- marble, polished woods, and stained glass windows, the walls of which exhibit tablets bearing the names and places of death of all those devoted alumni. Near and far around about this stately building are scattered others, well 103 io 4 SEAS AND LANDS. reared in granite, masonry, or brick, dedicated to Law, to Medicine, to Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Classical Studies, Gymnastic Exercises, &c. The Gymnasium is a particularly fine and well-equipped erection, and is scientifically conducted with a view to give Harvardians the corpus sanum which is so indispensable to the mens sana. Round about, or among these various and numerous edifices of the University, the " Halls " and "Houses" used by the students as residences cluster built mainly of red brick, in a plain substantial style, and harmonising well enough with the marble and stone- work of the other structures, and the groves of elm, ash, hickory, maple, and oak, everywhere liberally bestowing shade and verdure to the New England Academe. The President's House stands pleasantly in one of the open grassy spaces characteristic of Harvard, Brookline, and all the Boston suburbs, nor can I forbear repeating how agreeable a sense of good order and goodwill is imparted by these un- fenced gardens, open to all alike, but never tres- passed upon. There are no distinctive colleges in Harvard, but only " Halls and Houses," which do not produce any esprit de corps, as with us, as they are merely large common dormitories. It is a common practice for two students to occupy one apartment, with two small sleeping-rooms attached, or sometimes only one with two beds. The follow- ing table exhibits four scales of annual expendi- ture, the expenses of the long vacation not being included : HARVARD. Least. Economical. Moderate. Very Liberal. Tuition .... 150 $15 $150 $150 Books and stationery 28 35 45 6l Clothing 70 120 150 3OO Room .... 22 30 IOO ^75 Furniture (annual average) IO 15 25 50 Board .... 133 152 152 304 Fuel and light II 15 3 45 Washing '5 20 40 5 Societies and subscription to sports (annual average) ... 35 5 Servant .... 25 Sundries 45 55 8*5 150 Total . $484 $592 $812 $1,360 Members of any department of the University can board at cost by joining the association which uses the great dining-hall of Memorial Hall. The cost of board to the members of this association is expected not to Exceed $4.25 a week. It will be perceived that the Republic offers a high collegiate education and degree for less than ^100 per annum. The " men " wear no distinctive collegiate dress whatever. Harvard College was founded in 1636, by the General Court of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, the vote reading as follows "The Court agree to give ^400 towards a school or college, whereof ^200 shall be paid the next year, and 200 when the work is finished, and the next Court to appoint where and what building." In the following year John Harvard, a nonconforming clergyman of Eng- land, died at Charlestown, leaving half of his whole property and his entire library (about 300 volumes) to the institution. The value of this bequest was io6 . SEAS AND LANDS. more than double the entire sum originally voted by the Court, and it was resolved to open the college at once, and to give it the name of Harvard. The first class was formed in the same year. In 1642 the Act was passed establishing the overseers of Harvard College with this modest preamble " Whereas, through the good hand of God upon us, there is a college founded in Cambridge, in the county of Middlesex, called Harvard College, for the encourage- ment whereof this Court has given the sum of ^400, and also the revenue of the ferry betwixt Charles- town and Boston, and that the well ordering and managing of the said college is of great concern- ment." Assuredly it was of " great concernment," and has grown by nobly generous donations and personal devotion more than by any munificence of the Government, to its present wealth and usefulness, maintaining a splendid and erudite staff of sixty- six learned professors, besides numerous assistant-tutors, and being able to bestow on indigent but meritorious scholars as much as $45,000 a year in scholarships, "beneficiary funds," monitorships, and the like. A "parietal committee" looks after the discipline of the institution, which seems, however, to an Oxford man extremely lax, there being few or no restrictions as to hours, attendance at lectures or chapel, or roll- call ; and a general freedom as to coming and going, working or playing, which, however, appears to agree with the Democratic Muses ; for no one could desire to see a more gentlemanly or reasonably decorous set of students. The statutes say HARVARD. 107 The respective Faculties have authority to impose fines and levy assessments for damage done to property ; to inflict, at their discretion, the penalties of admonition, suspension, dismission, and expulsion, and to use all other appropriate means of discipline ; but no student shall be separated from the University, either temporarily or permanently, by a vote of less than two-thirds of the members of his Faculty present and voting thereon. Sus- pension is a separation from the University for a fixed period of time. It may be accompanied with a requirement of residence in a specified place, and of the performance of specified tasks. Dismission closes a student's connection with the University, without necessarily precluding his return. Expulsion is the highest academic censure, and involves final separation. Much, under such an easy regime, must obviously depend upon the character of the Principal, and Harvard is fortunate in possessing a head at present, perfectly blending the suaviter and fortiter in his just, commanding, and sympathetic sway. The regulations of the Gymnasium are very prac- tical and wise Upon entering the University, each student is entitled to an examination by the director, in which his physical proportions are measured, his strength tested, his heart and lungs examined, and information is solicited concerning his general health and inherited tendencies. From the data thus procured, a special order of appropriate exercises is made out for each student, with specifications of the movements and apparatus which he may best use. After working on this prescription for three or six months, the student is entitled to another examination, by which the results of his work are ascertained, and the director enabled to make a further prescription for his individual case. The Astronomical Observatory is most intelli- gently and sedulously carried on by its gifted director, Mr. Edward Pickering, under whose kind guidance I inspected admirably designed apparatus io8 SEAS AND LANDS. of registration and observation, and saw some of the most interesting examples of stellar photography and planet pictures. A perfect treasure- store has been accumulated of the spectra of stars, &c. The Arnold Arboretum is another special and excellent department. It was founded for the purpose of scientific research and experiment in arboriculture, forestry, and dendrology, and as a museum of trees and shrubs suited to the climate of Massachusetts. The arboretum occupies a por- tion of the Bussey farm in West Roxbury, 160 acres in extent, and under a special arrangement with the City of Boston is open to the public every day in the year from sunrise to sunset. The living col- lections are supplemented by an herbarium, museum, and library. These occupy temporarily the "D wight " House, at the corner of Warren and Cottage Streets in Brookline, until a suitable library and museum building can be erected on the arboretum grounds. There is an admirable College library where I saw the original MS. of Shelley's " Ode to a Skylark " managed by a devotee to his duties, Mr. Justin Winsor, open for use to all the students, who may have three volumes at a time for four weeks. The most singular and characteristic feature of the University is, perhaps, the arrangement under which preachers and ministers of all sorts of denominations take it by turns to officiate in the College chapel, or sometimes officiate there simultaneously, in a way which would suggest the Scotchman's definition of the haggis, viz., that it was "fine confused eating." HARVARD. 109 On June 14, 1886, on the unanimous recommenda- tion of the preachers and the Plummer Professor, the President and Fellows voted "That the statute numbered 15, concerning religious services, be amended by striking out the clause ' at which the attendance of the students is required,' " and on June 16 the Board of Overseers concurred in this vote. Attendance at the religious services of the University was thus, by the advice of those who conduct these services, and to the satisfaction of all concerned in them, made wholly voluntary. Oriental languages are not neglected, and Sanskrit especially is faithfully advanced by its accomplished professor, Mr. Charles R. Lanman, while the name of Professor Charles E. Norton, holding the chair of the Fine Arts, is known to all students of aesthetic literatures. Speaking of the splendid benefactions by which the buildings of Harvard have been reared, and its large educational staff endowed, President Eliot said, last year, in an address delivered before the "Phi Beta Kappa" Society- The endowment of institutions of education, including libraries and museums, by private persons in the United States is a pheno- menon without precedent or parallel, and is a legitimate effect of democratic institutions. Under a tyranny were it that of a Marcus Aurelius or an oligarchy, were it as enlightened as that which now rules Germany, such a phenomenon would be simply impossible. The University of Strasburg was lately established by an Imperial Decree, and is chiefly maintained out of the revenue of the State. Harvard University has been 250 years in growing to its present stature, and is even now inferior at many points to the new University of Strasburg; but Harvard is the creation of thousands of persons, living and dead, rich and poor, learned and simple, who have voluntarily given it their time, no SEAS AND LANDS. thought, or money, and lavished upon it their affection ; Stras- burg exists by the mandate of the ruling few directing upon it a part of the product of ordinary taxation. Like the voluntary system in religion, the voluntary system in the higher education buttresses democracy ; each demands from the community a large outlay of intellectual activity and moral vigour. The subjoined further remarks from the same eloquent lips cannot but be read with profit, as they give the views of one who is the chief scholar and highest dignitary of learning in the States, upon that phenomenon which every observer must note the gradual uprise in America of three aristocracies, those of historic descent, of culture, and of wealth. In politics the successful statesman founds nothing ; his gens often sinks back into the ocean of general existence, like a collapsed bubble. But the names of Dana, Cabot, Channing, Lothrop, Higginson, Endicott, Adams, and the like keep in front, like those of Cossus, Claudius, Appius, and Flavins in ancient Rome, and education flows constantly in the same channels generation after generation. The President's words were In the future there will undoubtedly be seen a great increase in the number of permanent families in the United States families in which honour, education, and property will be trans- mitted with reasonable certainty ; and a fair beginning has already been made. On the quinquennial catalogue of Harvard University there are about 560 family stocks, which have been represented by graduates at intervals for at least one hundred years. On the Yale catalogue there are about 420 such family stocks ; and it is probable that all other American colleges which have existed one hundred years or more show similar facts in pro- portion to their age and to the number of their graduates. There is nothing in American institutions to prevent this natural process from extending and continuing. The college graduate HARVARD. in who does not send his son to college is a curious exception. American colleges are, indeed, chiefly recruited from the sons of men who were not college-bred themselves ; for democratic society is mobile, and permits young men of ability to rise easily from the lower to the higher levels. But, on the other hand, nothing in the constitution of society forces men down who have once risen, or prevents their children and grandchildren from staying on the higher level if they have the virtue in them. The interest in family genealogies has much increased of late years, and hundreds of thousands of persons are already recorded in printed volumes which have been compiled and published by voluntary contributions or by the zeal of individuals. In the Harvard University Library are 415 American family genealogies, three- quarters of which have been printed since 1860. Many of these families might better be called clans or tribes, so numerous is their membership. Thus of the Northampton Lyman family there were living, when the family genealogy was published in 1872, more than 4000 persons. When some American Galton desires in the next century to study hereditary genius or character under a democracy, he will find ready to his hand an enormous mass of material. I must quote my distinguished friend and host once more upon a subject of universal interest that of whether the democratic form of government necessarily breeds democratic manners. Assuredly an Englishman misses in the States the deferential tone of old civilisations, the habitual regard of rank or position, the readiness to serve. But he finds as much or more goodwill, as much or more real serviceableness, as much or more of frank manly bonhomie, among these "nestlings of the Bird of Freedom." Here is what President Eliot said on the matter, and there can exist no higher authority, or more equitable if patriotic judge The highest education might exist, and yet the highest types of manners might fail. Do these faill On this important point ii2 SEAS AND LANDS. American experience is already interesting and, I think, con- clusive. Forty years ago Emerson said it was a chief felicity of our country that it excelled in women. It excels more and more. Who has not seen in public and in private life American women unsurpassable in grace and graciousness, in serenity and dignity, and in effluent gladness and abounding courtesy ? Now, the lady is the consummate fruit of human society at its best. In all the higher walks of American life there are men whose bearing and aspect at once distinguish them as gentlemen. They have personal force, magnanimity, moderation, and refinement ; they are quick to see and to sympathise ; they are pure, brave, and firm. These are also the qualities that command success, and herein lies the only natural connection between the possession of property and nobility of character. In a mobile or free society the excellent or noble man is likely to win ease and independence, bTat it does not follow that under any form of government the man of many possessions is necessarily excellent. On the evidence of my reading and of my personal observation at home and abroad, I fully believe that there is a larger proportion of ladies and gentlemen in the United States than in any other country. This proposition is, I think, true with the highest definition of the term " ]ady " or " gentleman ; " but it is also true, if ladies and gentle- men are only persons who are clean and well-dressed, who speak gently and eat with their forks. It is unnecessary, however, to claim any superiority for democracy in this respect ; enough that the highest types of manners in men and women are produced abundantly on democratic soil. It would appear, then, from American experience that neither generations of privileged ancestors, nor large inherited possessions, are necessary to the making of a lady or a gentleman. What is necessary ? In the first place, natural gifts. The gentleman is born in a democracy, no less than in a monarchy. It was my privilege and honour to lecture twice before the University of Harvard by special invita- tion ; and the extreme consideration of the audience rendered easy and pleasant an otherwise formidable task. The lectures were delivered in the Sander's Theatre of the Memorial Hall, holding 1400, a HARVARD. 113 large portion of whom were students of Harvard. In the first address I sought to expound the three main philosophical ideas found in the Upanishads, or religious treatises of the Vedanta ; and in the second I had upon the table a printed and a manu- script Sanskrit text of the colossal Epic Poem of India called "The Mahabharata," of which I ex- plained the leading incidents and general character, reading my own translation of the concluding por- tions. I only mention this to record that no one could have had a more intelligent, attentive, or sym- pathetic audience than the University furnished, and that the success of one so ill-qualified to speak upon such great topics topics, moreover, promis- ing so little general attraction was a convincing proof of the eagerness of these young educated American gentlemen for expanded ideas. And since the last periods of the second lecture em- bodied ideas which I had formed as to the great utility of philosophical studies and particularly of Oriental metaphysics and literature for the American student, I shall venture to append here the peroration of that address. After terminating the descriptive and recitative part of what I had to say, these words were added Since I am happy enough to find myself face to face with the students of this renowned University, I would venture, not on the impertinence of advice, of which I am incapable, but on the privilege of a few friendly, respectful remarks, encouraged by your generous reception to-night As I have seen in Washington, with great interest, the Capitol, and in it the Supreme Court which is the heart of your political life, so I recognise here, in the seat H ii4 SEAS AND LANDS. of learning so worthily ruled by my valued friend and gracious host President Eliot, the intellectual centre of your vast com- munity. It is not because Oxford is older than Harvard that an Oxonian sees any further into the future than a Harvard man, or has any right to give himself prophetic or archaeological airs. It is true that my grandfather served King George before your Constitution was even drawn up, and that my own particular college was founded by King Alfred the Great. But we have no record in our ancient seats of learning so wholly noble and so unspeakably exalting as the building in which I am addressing you. When first I entered it I read, with feelings of admiration, and I may say of irrepressible envy, the Latin inscription over its gateway, " In memoriam eorum qui his sedibus instituti mortem pro patrid oppetiverunt. " I have found with pride and pleasure, greater than any aristocratic ties could ever give me, the names of friends, and even of kindred by marriage, inscribed among those illustrious dead whom Harvard offered on the shrine of a pure and lofty, and a justly victorious patriotism. Passing through your Memorial Hall, and reading that imperishable cata- logue of youthful worthies, who suddenly learned the highest lessons that life can teach at the knee of Duty, and by the light of the flash of cannons fresh, moreover, from journeying through your rich and fertile States I have realised, as never before, the meaning of Lowell's lines, where, speaking of America, he wrote " Binding the gold of war-dishevelled hair On such sweet brows as never other bore." At Concord Bridge I have seen the now peaceful and sylvan spot where "the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot, heard round the world," and I bared my head, as much to them, as at the adjacent grave of King George's soldiers, who also died for duty, defending a mistaken policy. At Gettysburg I have passed near the spot where the peach-trees now cover with bright con- ciliating verdure the field whereon North and South met in de- plorable but inevitable conflict. You have had by the strange and stern decree of Destiny, to contend with and to vanquish first your fathers, and next your brothers. I think you have still one more great combat, and one more consummating victory to win, which will be over yourselves ! If I were a Harvard man my dream and desire would be to help to continue that brilliant galaxy of intellect which glitters already with the names of Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, HARVARD. 115 Irving, and many another such. If I were a Harvard man I would hope and strive to give to that statue of Liberty which towers aloft over your New York harbour, as Pallas Athene once looked majestically over Sunium, the golden aegis of great and high ideas, leavening the practical pursuits of life ; the ivory carved and chased, of an ever-aspiring Republican art and litera- ture, signal alike for courage, elevation, and refinement I would aspire to have America regarded abroad as large-hearted as she is liberal, as equitable as she is fearless, as splendid in the service of all mankind as she is strong for her own security and progress. And among the minor means to this I would wish to see culti- vated those fields of Eastern philosophical thought which I have here so feebly and hastily traversed, as affording a sweet and sovereign medicine against the fever of a too busy national life. I would ask the days as they pass to bestow, as Emerson sings, not merely material gifts, not alone natural development, not the gross and transient boons of which you are assured wealth, success, influence, comfort, and expansion (the "herbs and apples " of his divine parable), but the meditations which exalt, the aims which ennoble, the convictions which consecrate, the studies which redeem the life of man, for these are now most necessary to the wide liberties of your country, and will best embellish her greatness. Cultivate, therefore, I entreat, under my good friend, your able and accomplished Sanskrit professor, among other studies, at all events, the philosophies and literature of India; rejecting what your strong and sober sense will perceive to be useless or childish in them, while some of you at least assimilate and utilise the loftiest and most elevating of their conceptions. India belongs to you, in the same sense in which she belongs to us, and I rejoice that you are preparing to share our rights. Do you know that the Mayflower, whicli brought your ancestors hither, went down in Indian waters off Masulipatam 1 Raise her some day in fancy and freight her with a glorious new cargo of fresh inves- tigations from Massachusetts Bay, wherein we shall find the Old World interpreted by the New World, and American scholars outdoing the best of England and Germany. If I should live to see that, I should feel like Robinson Crusoe, who, shaking forth a few grains from an almost empty sack upon a generous ami fertile soil, passed by thereafter to find upon the spot a splendid and a fruitful harvest. CHICAGO, Oct. 4. 1889. CHAPTER IX. OCEAN TO OCEAN. WE have just accomplished, in five days and five nights and five hours, without fatigue or discomfort of any kind, the extraordinary railway journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which so many people per- form nowadays without so much as reflecting upon the vast advance of civilisation and the amazing human enterprise which it betokens. Between after- noon tea on Thursday, October 3, and supper- time on Tuesday, October 8, we have securely and pleasantly travelled over 3640 miles in a continuous course, passing through thirteen or fourteen of the States of the Union, crossing, among many great streams and rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, and exchanging for the view across Boston harbour and the Atlantic an outlook, through the Golden Gates, over the Pacific Ocean. It is not feasible to achieve this remarkable transit in one and the same carriage. We travelled first by the Boston and Albany Railway to Chicago ; thence, after an hour's delay and transfer by omni- bus, to Council Bluffs by the Chicago and North- Western ; and then, crossing the Missouri to Omaha, completed the journey by the Union 116 OCEAN TO OCEAN. 117 Pacific in a three days' run. Thus there occur two shifts of carriages and one change of station upon this, the most direct route ; enough to break a little the monotony of the long ride and to give a chance of stretching the confined limbs. But for three whole days and nights we were domi- ciled permanently "on board" one Pullman car, the " Paraiso," in ample comfort. By day a little table, fixed between the luxurious seats, enables you to read, write, and study at ease. There are smoking, toilet, and dining-rooms attached, and I append the menu of one of our breakfasts, cooked on board the train, and admirably served while the carriage was going at thirty-five miles an hour. Breakfast. Fruit, Canteloupe melons ; oatmeal, coffee, English breakfast tea, chocolate, dry toast, hot rolls, dipped toast, plain bread, Boston brown bread toast, corn bread, griddle cakes, with maple syrup, stewed oysters, raw oysters, broiled whitefish, salt mackerel ; tenderloin steak, plain, mushrooms, or tomato sauce ; sirloin steak, broiled ham, breakfast bacon ; mutton chops, plain, or with tomato sauce ; calves' liver, with bacon ; veal cutlets, breaded ; sausage, fried chicken, sliced tomatoes, broiled Spanish mackerel; eggs boiled, fried, scrambled; omelette, plain, with parsley or jelly ; potatoes fried, baked, stewed. Price 75 cents. At night the African " porters " swiftly and in- geniously let down the roof of the car, and transform that and the seats below into wholly commodious sleeping berths. Rocked by the slight vibration of the speed, you slumber peacefully, and awake to find a totally new region flying past your window. Prairie-dog villages, perhaps, instead of big cities ; or a desert of rolling sage-brush where yesterday all was maple, maize-fields, and painted farmhouses. n8 SEAS AND LANDS. The woods of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire had put on their full autumn glory of colour as our train sped swiftly from Boston to Albany. It is the sugar-maple which lends the brightest hues to the extraordinary palette where- with Nature decks these American groves in the " Fall." There are really no names bright enough for the blazing reds, the burning scarlets, the fiery vermilions by which the sugar-maple suddenly betakes herself to the task of lighting up the forests and river banks as soon as the first frost touches her scalloped leaves. But the, other trees and shrubs aid in the general effect with all manner of startling or tender tints. The birch lends her sprays of delicate pale yellow, swaying lightly above a stem of silvery white, like patines of thinly beaten gold ; the beech contributes a russet deepening into warm brown ; the hickory a mellow brownish- yellow ; the sassafras a crimson, vividly contrasting with its green under leaves and purple seed spikes ; the huckleberry spreads sheets of flame-coloured bush all over the openings ; the butternut changes its airy foliage to saffron, the elm to amber, the oak to dark vandyke brown, and the swamp-willow to citron and sienna ; while minor varieties take in- termediate shades and blendings, until there are whole woodsides in this fair autumn time up and down New England which absolutely dazzle and amaze by the superlative splendour of their colour- ing. And all these delicate golden and purple gleams, alternating and mingling with the ambers, OCEAN TO OCEAN. 119 the russets, the burnt siennas, the deep rich browns, the pale citrons, and sea-greens, and silvery whites, and soft reds of the forest tribes, and sudden flame-bursts of the sassafras leaves, are constantly being heightened by the sugar-maple's flashes of blood-red radiance, and explosions of burning brilliance in masses of scarlet branches ; the whole superb display of colour being harmoniously backed and blended by the unchanging dark green of the pines, which, in almost every sylvan scene, compose the heart of these gorgeously apparelled forests. We pass Worcester, Mass., where iron and steel wire is largely manufactured, prettily situated near Lake Quinsigamond and Wachuset Mountain ; and next Springfield, famous for the United States Arsenal, and for its Hampden Park Racecourse ; and so arrive, when night has fallen, amid the electric lamps and steam vessels of Albany, at the head of the Hudson River navigation. When morning breaks we are flying hard along the south shore of Lake Ontario, towards Buffalo, hardly recovered yet from the demoralising effects of a supper served at the station of Syracuse, where only twelve minutes were allowed for six or seven courses. The astounded stomach, which has to undergo such an experience not the only one of the kind en route takes time, even with the strongest temperament, to regain its pristine equa- nimity. Buffalo is a large city, and does much business on these bright waters with steamers and i 2 o SEAS AND LANDS. schooners, besides manufacturing brass, iron, tin, and copper wares. Then we speed on to the shore of Lake Erie, and skirt that magnificent inland sea, where the fresh water is seen rolling shore wards in billows which might do credit to the ocean itself, under stress of a strong north-east wind. Approaching Cleveland a melancholy incident occurs. No fence shuts out the sovereign people here from the track of the locomotive. It goes tearing along through streets, farmsteads, fields, and crowded villages, merely sounding a bell when it first starts, and afterwards tootling a steam-horn fitfully when it comes near a level crossing. All the crossings are level, and the only precaution adopted is to erect a sign-post at the spot, inscribed, " Railway track. Look out for the Locomotive ! " We hear our engine, which has just left a station, give a more energetic blast than is usual, and then the brakes are felt and speed slackens ; but, alas ! we have already perceived from the windows the broken body of a poor man flung to the side of the track by the " cow-catcher," which has too evidently frac- tured the skull and killed him, since where he falls and lies a thick stream of blood trickles forth upon the ballast. The train has been stopped and backed, and the corpse is gathered up and placed on a lorry, to be wheeled to the station just quitted. On the spot where the unhappy man was tossed a quantity of apples lie scattered upon the ground, the contents of his bundle. It appears, by subse- OCEAN TO OCEAN. 121 quent information, that he was deaf and a cripple. Imagine anybody out of America obliged to walk with a crutch and stick choosing the track of the express train for his promenade ! The engine-driver states that he blew the signal loudly, but in vain ; that the hapless .victim was attending to another train coming from the opposite direction, and that the locomotive-guard, catching him behind the foot, flung him backwards against the bars, " right away ; so that the first thing he knew about it was to find himself dead." The signs of this sorrowful, but too natural and too ordinary accident, are quickly cleansed from the engine-front ; the body disappears to some shed to await an inquest, with the crutch and the apples lying beside it on the truck, and we go on our way to Chicago, while he, who was bound only to the next store, has by the mysterious way- bill of life suddenly taken the longest journey of all. May it be well with him ! Cleveland is now reached ; a town of much im- portance, with 160,000 inhabitants, seated on Lake Erie, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. The Ohio Canal and the Petroleum Refineries have mainly created its prosperity. By reason of its well-shaded streets and green parks and gardens it has won the name of " Forest City." Lake View Cemetery here, one of those beautiful gardens of the dead which are so distinctive of America, con- tains the venerated remains of President Garfield, the spot of whose assassination, marked by a silver star, at the railway station in Washington, we had 122 SEAS AND LANDS. previously seen. Toledo, planted on the west end of Lake Erie, is a good example of the rapid growth of American towns. In 1850 it had only 3000 inhabitants, and it is now peopled by 60,000 souls, and ranks third after Chicago and Milwaukee in the Lake grain and shipping* trade. But here, quitting Ohio, the train flies through the north of Indiana State, crossing the lower end of that vast peninsula of Michigan, which lies between the lake of the same name and Lake Huron. Chicago is reached late in the evening, and at this point a transfer must be made across the city from the "depot" of the Boston and Albany Railway to that of the Chicago and North-Western Company. Now we obtain seats and sleeping-berths which will only once be changed until arrival in San Francisco, and one settles down for the four nights and four days which are to finish the transcon- tinental journey with all the feelings of tenants secure from eviction. The glories of Chicago have been sufficiently sung by others, and everybody knows what a Phoenix among modern cities she is. Organised as a town in 1833, an d incorporated in 1837, she then had 4170 inhabitants, increased in 1880 to 503,304, and now over 700,000. The great conflagration took place in 1871, destroying 17,500 houses at a loss of almost 200,000,000 dollars. In 1874 another fire destroyed about 5,000,000 dollars' worth of property. The new city, which rose superbly from the ashes, has buildings in its business parts unsurpassed by OCEAN TO OCEAN. 123 any other of the large towns on the continent. It ranks next to New York in commercial importance, and in 1854 was already the largest grain shipping port of the world. Its cattle, pork, and timber trades stand pre-eminent over any similar market in the world. Manufacturing is also very largely carried on, employing above 150,000 hands in pro- ductions very varied. The storage capacity for grain and other produce is about 40,000,000 bushels. It is the greatest railway centre on the continent, having a water frontage of thirty-eight miles, taking in the river and its branches. This is not includ- ing the lake front, where an outer harbour is now finished. Traversing Illinois by night the Mississippi is crossed, here only a little river, and one of sand- banks and scant water, compared to what she is destined to become when " Mighty Missouri " further west has added her sister wave. Beyond the Mississippi the State of Iowa stretches out to view interminable fields of maize, which is now chiefly standing in shocks, with pumpkins, shining like helmets of gold, intermixed in the bountiful crop. The channels traversed here all drain south- ward to the Mississippi, and the country continues rich and green by reason of their waters, while the train steams forward past Boone, on the Des Moines River, past Loveland, where it dips into the Missouri Valley, to Council Bluffs, seat of Pottawattamise County, built upon high cliffs overlooking the Mis- souri Valley. Here a prodigious iron bridge, more 124 SEAS AND LANDS. than a mile long, lifts the traveller across the great stream to Omaha, in Nebraska State, on the farther bank. Planted half on the river bed, half on the lofty brows ranging along it, Omaha looks, as she is, a " big place," with a thriving business. We shall go on hence, all night, along the Platte JRiver, where the towns and townships still cluster quite thickly as far as Grand Island. Then the veritable prairie begins, which has for some distance past been announcing its advent by vast stretches of grassy plains interlocking with the maize-fields and pumpkins, the clover and the beech groves. All day long, this hot and blue Sunday, have we steamed through the rolling hillocks and widespread, sea-like levels of a measureless expanse, wherein grow nothing but grasses, burned to drab by the bright, rainless weather, yet maintaining, and evidently even fattening, hundreds of thousands of fine cattle and droves of horses. Far and near roamed these beautiful oxen and shapely steeds, grazing ; and apparently as much untended as the bygone buffaloes, their predecessors, whose natural food, the " buffalo grass," covers every hollow. Yet now and again you would see emerging from some dusty hillside the figure of the Cow-boy, with which South Kensington made us all familiar. He would suddenly appear, mounted on a wiry buck-jumper, with heavy spurs and whip, controlling the herd. We have by this time left behind upon the wooded hills and valleys the large centres of population. The latest stragglers of the many pines and maples OCEAN TO OCEAN. 125 have gradually yielded to the prairie, which will show no trees, or hardly any. The knots of shops and huts occurring here and there along the line call themselves "cities" still, but are merely villages for the ranchers to shop at, and whence they may entrain their produce. A little wooden church, painted red and green, with three graves only in its churchyard of an acre, testifies to the newness of one settlement which we pass. At another, Ogallala, a frame and wattled building, proudly inscribed " Opera House," might perhaps hold one hundred people. The real and almost innumerable inhabitants of the Prairie, as we now behold it, are those singular creatures the prairie-dogs, to be seen in thousands all through Nebraska from the windows of the train. Everybody has read descriptions of these odd little animals, and many, no doubt, who peruse these lines have had opportunities of examining them to better advantage than when natural history is studied at twenty-five miles an hour. But you may certainly see as many as ever you please to watch in the Nebraska prairies, since the " dogs " have grown entirely accustomed to the passing locomotive, and regard it and the cars from their " cities " with as calm a nonchalance as suburban dwellers in London exhibit, smoking in their back gardens. At intervals of three or four miles all along the track, for as far as one hundred miles, these "cities" are encountered, groups of hillocks and burrows, where the light soil of the prairie has 126 SEAS AND LANDS. been scratched out, and heaped in a neat mound over the excavation. On the top of this, or near at hand, sit the prairie-dogs, or stand for they have a rabbit-like fashion of rising upon their hindquarters and folding their fore-feet, in a meditative manner, across their white breasts. Their general colour is sandy-brown, with a dark collar. When they run, it is in a style partly resembling a dog, partly a rat, and they cock aloft a short tail which they possess in a most comically important way. Once or twice I observed the small owl perched on a prairie-dog's hillock, which is well known to be a joint tenant of his burrow, together with the rattlesnake ; but no specimen of the latter, of course, came under such rapid observation. The wind blows all the fine dust away from the stuff turned out by the " dog," leaving a pile of smooth pebbles, so that he seems to have taken to mining operations for gold or jewels. There will be from fifty to three hundred burrows in a " city," and two or three " dogs " visible on or near each ; and, seeing that they are generally located far from water, the prairie-dog must either be indifferent to drinking, or must find what moisture he needs in roots and succulent stems. Near Cheyenne we leave Nebraska, and, touching a corner of Colorado, enter Wyoming, the southern regions of which we traverse all Sunday night, finding ourselves on Monday morning amid the wild granitic mountains, called Wahsatch and Uintah. These are offshoots of the Rocky Range, and gaunt OCEAN TO OCEAN. 127 avant-gardes of the desolate, arid, and yellow upland basin in which lies the Great Salt Lake, now very near. It seems strange that, after painfully crossing the interminable plains and ranges which the " Union Pacific" now so lightly traverses, Brigham Young and his Mormons should have finally halted in the forbidden region here reached when the green sierra lay not far beyond. Grim, bare, weather-worn boulders of red and drab granite of enormous size line the dusky track, melancholy basins of dark ochreous sand, dotted with the everlasting "sage-brush," alternate with awful crags opening into gloomy canyons a land of exceeding loneliness and de- pressing apparent barrenness, where a ring of stones and a wooden cross now and again marks the grave of some forgotten pioneer, and plentiful bleached skeletons of cattle and horses show how difficult and costly was the overland voyage of the old time for the "prairie schooner," as the emigrant's waggon was styled. A happier record is to be observed painted on the granite rocks at Summit, where "Troy Jack" and "Jemmy Kidd" have inscribed their honest names on the occasion, as they let us know, of fixing the highest rails in this part of the over- land line, and the difference between steam and the ancient fashion of crossing the continent is illustrated, to the honour and glory of those good workers, as we run by more than one slow party of settlers "on the trail." Thundering down the in- clines, toiling laboriously with two engines up the i 2 8 SEAS AND LANDS. heavy grades, the " Paraiso " as our car is named rattles finally into Ogden station early on Monday morning. A batch of cow-boys in the station-yard shows that ranching goes on even in these seeming deserts. A group of Red Indians, in parti-coloured blankets, hangs disconsolately about the place the first yet seen of the former owners of the land. The huge hills round the hot town are smoking with brushwood fires, lighted to improve the pasturage. The Great Salt Lake lies near the depot, glittering green in colour, under the strong sunlight, and belted with a dazzling border of the white alkali, which covers every flat and lowland in the vicinity. Now we coast the northern shores of this Dead Sea of Central North America, which recalls all the features of Lake Asphaltites in Palestine. The same parched red mountains are ranged around it, from whose sides and from the adjoining "wadis" is washed the bitter saline efflorescence which glistens all over the face of the plain and girdles the emerald water with a border of silver. But that water is poisonous as vitriol, and the silver- edged banks are fatal to all animal life. Nor can there exist any more dreary little settlements than these which cluster round each isolated station. Skirting for some hours the shallows of the great dismal sea, our train plunges into the upper portion of the Utah Desert, and hence, for many hundreds of miles, the track lies through a bleak, barren, mono- tonous region of naked mountains and treeless, hungry, stony plains, for ever glistening with the OCEAN TO OCEAN. 129 bitter alkali, for ever covered with the brittle, brist- ling, dull-grey " sage-brush," unredeemed by the wing of a single bird or the footmark of a solitary furred creature. All day long, and all night long, and all day long again, the overland train thunders on, hurtles through the canyons, and rattles over the basins of this lonely land, where the pioneers of the line had to wage fierce battle with the Red Indians more than once in order to get their sleepers laid and their rails fixed. Now and then, at the way- side stations, a group of the aboriginals may be observed, with gay blankets and grimy, savage faces, subdued into dazed acquiescence with the new order of things, which has taken from them their desolate uplands and the buffalo -grazing grounds below. If they wish to travel by the fire- horse, which, along with the fire-water, has doomed their tribes, the administration permits them to squat on the tail-boards of the cars, where they enjoy the dust, and jar, and smoke of forty miles per hour, as a perfectly delightful luxury. Not until Reno is reached, about 280 miles from San Francisco, do we emerge from that awful wilder- ness of Utah and Nevada, which the Union Pacific has pierced, and rendered a bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific. At Reno a little mountain stream, the Truckee, transforms the waste into a garden of green crops and poplar groves, showing that nothing is needed except water to give to all those silent glistening alkali flats and red naked I i3o SEAS AND LANDS. uplands the harvests of Iowa and the pastures of Nebraska. One learns the immeasurable value of a river in noting how the little Truckee, as far as her slender stream can be spread, causes plenty to spring from desolation, and the blank white wilder- ness to laugh with verdure. At this point of the prodigious journey the upper peaks of the Sierra Nevada come into sight, and we commence the ascent of the Californian Alps. The wilderness lies, at last, behind us ; before us are gigantic mountain-walls, planted thickly with pine forests, rugged with hanging boulders, lined here and there with long slides of timber, constructed by the lumberers, in order to send down the dressed trunks from the upper woods. Just beyond Truckee, at an elevation of more than 5000 feet, we cross the dividing line between the States of California and Nevada, the latter of which, albeit larger than all Ireland, contains only a population of 12,000 souls. But she is rich in silver and gold mines, and in unlimited possibilities, and she, moreover, runs southward down from these wintry highlands, where even now the snow lies thick amid the pines, to the burning regions of Yucca and Yuma upon the Colorado Kiver. On the Divide, at a station named " Summit," we top the snowy Sierra, and are at an elevation of 7400 feet. The air is rarefied, as well as severely chilly, and greatcoats and shawls are worn even in our well-closed car. The heavy snowstorm of last night, the first of the season, has thickly loaded OCEAN TO OCEAN. 131 all the great pines with white wreaths, and given to the tall peaks around a very wintry aspect. From this point to the Blue Canyon below, the views are magnificent, but the endless line of snow-sheds cuts them off continually from the eager gaze. These sheds extend for twenty-seven miles in an almost unbroken series, built solidly of timber to guard the trains from avalanches and drifts ; and they fre- quently take fire, to the heavy loss of the company and the serious delay of passengers. The track boldly curving, and ascending or descending heavy grades, skirts for some time a large mountain tarn, called Donner Lake, from the explorer of that name, who perished by its margin with all his party. Enormous in girth and altitude are the firs growing on the mountain-sides hereabouts, and marvellous are the vistas as one glances through their huge trunks and branches laced with the snow, at the deep valleys lying below the track. We are two hours late in our transit of 3600 miles no very serious unpunctuality but the engineer is anxious to be "on time" in Sacramento; and the long train, with its cars each weighing twenty tons, rolls down the Pacific slope at a pace to make nervous persons uncomfortable. And now, as if by magic, the scene changes while we rapidly drop to the sunny uplands and foot-hills of Alta California. The snow dis- appears, the trees multiply in variety and number, wild blossoms deck the undergrowth the rich red soil glows in the sunshine through the full foliage we fly through lovely groves, through verdant clear* i 3 2 SEAS AND LANDS. ings, then clusters of pretty cottages, to a region of vineyards and orchards. Lower down, at Dutch Flat, we come to where the gold-miners have washed away a whole mountain-side with their hydraulic pipes, and lower still we pass a Chinese village, and rattle merrily down to the Sacramento plain, whence 'Frisco is distant only ninety miles. Speedily these are run over, and reaching Port Costa the entire train is put on board an immense ferry-steamer, and we cross an inlet of the sea, for Oakland, the terminus of the long line. Here another ferry- steamer receives and wafts us over the Sacramento, and we repair to the big Palace Hotel at San Francisco, neither fatigued nor bored with the traject of 3600 miles from Massachusetts Bay to the Golden Gate, although our longest stop on the passage has not been above seventy minutes. SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 9, i88q. CHAPTER X. SAN FRANCISCO. THE capital of California is like nothing else in the United States. A city only forty years old, with a population of nearly 360,000 souls, with rateable estate valued at 1,800,000 dollars, with a vast maritime commerce filling its magnificent bay ; north and south of it a territory of boundless fer- tility, east of it the Sierra Range, holding up to the sun millions of acres of luxuriant forests, rich vineyard soil, and terraces where the bounty of Nature gives almost anything for the asking, to say nothing of its out-turn of gold, which from 1848 to 1888 was worth over 1,000,000,000 dollars such is San Francisco. She bears everywhere amid her exuberant prosperity tokens of her rapid growth. The drill-marks are not as yet worn out from her granite road-stones, even in the busiest thorough- fares ; the finest paved ways in her proudest streets are interrupted by patches of rotten plank ; splendid palaces of commerce or pleasure alternate with low shanties of framework or adobe huts ; and in her very midst nestles the hideous and uncleanly Chinese quarter, which, when really finished, she will not tolerate. It almost takes the breath of 133 i 3 4 SEAS AND LANDS. statisticians away when they attempt to recite the facts and figures of the birth and development of this extraordinary capital. Its first house was only built in 1835, when the place was called " Yerba Buena," from a medicinal root which grows wild here. At that time it transacted a poor little trade with Indians in oil and hides. One day a settler named Marshall found gold at Coloma, and the tide of adventurers began to flow which carried " 'Frisco" to the high-water mark of affluence. The "rush" is long ago over; the ships which brought the gold-diggers by thousands are doing duty as coal hulks or flour stores ; the red wood and cedar bushes have grown over the spots on the Sierra where the first miners got their dust and nuggets. But California has found better things than gold or silver in her soil her forests, her trade, her farms and dairies, and, above all, in her delightful climate, where anybody can work all the day through, from one year's end to another. The gold fever has abated, and left her all the healthier, with the habit, however, of prodigious affluence, and a passion for that solid coinage of single and double eagles, which it is a pleasure to handle after the grubby one and five dollar notes of the Eastern States. The city stands on the inner slope of a singular peninsula, planted between a gulf and the ocean. The ground it now sits on has been pushed forward into the sea (the hills at the back being steep), so that there are to-day paved streets where in 1 849 large ships used to ride at anchor. The business quarters SAN FRANCISCO. 137 are compactly built, and the city, as a whole, covers an area of about eleven square miles. Built in the shape of an amphitheatre, upon three hills, it presents a striking appearance when seen from the sea or bay, and is regularly laid out with broad streets, vilely paved. The principal thoroughfare is Market Street. Kearney and Montgomery Streets are fashionable promenades, with handsome retail shops. Pine and California Streets are what Wall Street is to New York, or Broad Street and Lombard Street to London, the chief centres for bankers, brokers, and insurance companies. California Street Hill is perhaps the most " genteel " portion of the town. Sacramento, Dupont, Jackson, Pacific; and Commercial Streets form the Chinese quarter. The tramways are the urban wonder of San Francisco. You can go everywhere, at all times, up and down hill, landwards or seawards, without a minute's delay, by the ubiquitous car not electric, as in Boston, but propelled by endless wire ropes running under the street cobbles. Wherever you walk the rumble of the wheels and ropes under your footsteps will remind you that it is San Francisco, and the paving of the thoroughfares is so rough and loose that driving, except on the trams, becomes a real penance. Thus "all the world" throngs the cars, which fly to and fro, completely replacing omnibuses, which do not exist, and cabs, the hire of which, as in all American cities, is prohibitively dear. A large proportion of the people in the streets is Mongolian, and after a little time you must make 138 SEAS AND LANDS. the prescribed expedition to the Chinese quarter. I had the mistaken notion that the Californian Canton was situated by the water's edge, and always wondered why the San Franciscans could not put up more patiently with what I had imagined to be a sort of Flowery Land Wapping. But I wonder no longer at the impatience of the San Franciscans against the almond-eyed folk, nor at the occasional violence of the " hoodlums ; " for the Chinese city here, which I have again and again explored, is a most unmitigated nuisance to the Californian capital, and a perpetual danger to its health and peace. It is lodged like a portion of another planet in the very heart of the city, close to Kearney Street, one of the chief business quarters, and near to other great and important thorough- fares, the value and salubrity of which it most seriously impairs. You come upon it quite suddenly. You turn abruptly from a causeway full of splendid shops and handsome restaurants into narrow lanes where the odd names of pig-tailed merchants alter- nate in English characters with long swinging tablets in blue, yellow, and vermilion, covered with the Chinese inscriptions denoting their trades and commodities. The sensitive nostril recognises the locality before the eyes light upon it by a peculiar and wholly indescribable evil odour which must for ever henceforward remain associated with the thought of China and the Chinese. They do not live in this extraordinary quarter, but rather wallow like pigs and burrow like rats. The cellars of every low and SAN FRANCISCO. 139 filthy tenement in the twenty or thirty streets in- habited by them are choked with Chinese, packed away at night like sardines. You enter any one of these, and plunge down a rotten staircase into a dark, narrow passage, on either side of which are ranged double bunks, one above the other, like those on board the most crowded emigrant ship. In the passage-way some are frizzling absolutely repulsive articles of diet over lamps or charcoal fires : in the bunks, stretched on bits of matting, others are lying asleep, or mending their unwashed clothing, or smoking tobacco and opium. There is no air, nor any attempt to provide it. The daily and nightly arrangements of these Chinese are, in truth, one long and constant contempt of every accepted principle of sanitation ; yet they live and thrive, and are reputed by no means especially un- healthy. Thanks to the sandy soil on which San Fran- cisco is built, the Chinese landlord or tenant of a house in this quarter can delve as deeply as he likes in the way of subterranean dens, and many of these underground burrows go thirty feet into the earth. Those who were smoking opium in the lodging-bunks were only amateurs, taking a whiff of second or third rate stuff after the day's labours. The serious opium-smoker frequents establishments provided for the purpose, some of which we visited. Here he reclines on a mat, on an upper or lower berth of the close, stifling closet, which holds, perhaps, a dozen votaries of the anodyne. An i 4 o SEAS AND LANDS. attendant furnishes a little smoky oil lamp, a lychee shell full of the black sticky extract, a long brass pin, and a thick pipe made of bamboo, with a tiny metal bowl fixed midway upon its stem. Reclining with his head upon a wooden pillow, the votary, who is far beyond that stage of self-consciousness or self-respect which objects to being watched by "foreign devils," dips the pin in the treacly-looking mess, rolls it round and round into a black bead, which he roasts in the smoky lamp flame till it bubbles, fizzles, swells, and partially dries up. Then he pushes it into the small bowl, and holding bowl and charge against the lamp-wick, draws into his lungs the two or three " bouche*es " of fume afforded by the pillule of drug, expelling them afterwards through his nostrils. At once he wipes out the bowl, rolls another pill on the pin, roasts it in the flame, and inhales the fumes, till you observe the eyes with which he watches the process grow more and more dim, and the pupils more contracted, and suddenly he is motionless and lost in stupor the operation is complete soul and body are away together in " Poppy-Land," where for an hour or two there will be no cares, no tasks, no home-sick longings for distant China ; no unkind " Mellican man " to make life a burden ; no life at all except a heavy, vague, soft, sodden trance, traversed by dreams which seem like pictures outlined in moon- beams upon the darkness. There are those who think that opium keeps the Chinaman from fever and pestilence in such horribly SAN FRANCISCO. 141 close lairs, and certainly his ordinary diet seems to need some corrective. We explored the groceries, eating-houses, and druggist shops of the region with much suffering to the olfactory nerves, and total loss of any appetite for lunch. Food may be simple, and even coarse, without becoming repulsive, but the Chinese " charcutier " aims at and attains the ghastly and the grotesque in all his wares. The carcases of his pigs suggest murder rather than slaughter, so blood-boltered are they, if fresh so mangled and glistening with red grease, if pickled. The very aspect of his strings of sausage would turn the stomach of a saveloy vendor in the New Cut. He splits open his ducks and geese, and flattens them, insides and all, into frightful, oily, black trapezoids of shining leather. In one jar he keeps decomposed shrimps, in another rats' tails, in a third the eyes of fishes, in a fourth onions soaked in treacle, while shoots of bamboo pickled in brine and sea-slugs rolled in sugar occupy other recep- tacles. A particular delicacy was pointed out in the shape of a dozen lizards spitted together on a stick, and dried in the form of mouldy grey vine-leaves. The witches of Macbeth might, in fact, have accumulated all the ingredients of their cauldron, by one marketing, at the terrible em- porium where the above articles were inspected. In a Mongolian pharmacy, hard by, the materiel medica was even more astonishing. The chemists of the Celestial Kingdom deal still in all those strange, far-fetched, and extremely nasty prepara- 142 SEAS AND LANDS. tions which physicked our Middle Ages. Among the ordinary prescriptions hanging on the file of this Chinese " Apothecaries' Hall " was one which, being translated, ran, " Let him take, at the third hour, with root of lily, dried dust of snake, bone, so much, and of red pepper, and of willow shavings, and the dung of bats in oil." The establishment was full of slicing machines, cutting up all sorts of leaves and twigs into medicinal form, and a Chinaman in blue shirt and pigtail was seated on a bench working with his feet an iron wheel up and down a metal groove, in order to grind the ingredients of pills and potions as unsavoury as that mentioned. In traversing the narrow alleys and underground burrows of China Town at midnight, other and less describable scenes met the eye, for morality of the non-Confucian kind is simply ignored, and there were whole streets of little lattice-windowed tenements which would have made the Cities of the Plain appear comparatively respectable. In the principal theatre where we sat on the stage an interminable comedy was being enacted by boy- players draped as women, to the music of an orchestra which spared no discord that gongs, cymbals, and squeaking strings could produce. The large audience of Chinamen all in the same dark blue garb and packed like herrings seemed to enjoy the piece, and found no incongruity, apparently, in a party of strange foreigners sitting and smoking in front of the footlights. SAN FRANCISCO. 143 From the theatre to the chief Chinese restaurant was a natural transition, and here was seen the haute cuisine of the quarter, odd compounds and viands served in innumerable little bowls and dishes, and all partaken of by means of chopsticks, which the guests used with incredible dexterity. It would be, however, a drawback to the pleasure of supping with them that each man, after thrusting the chopsticks into his opened mouth, inserts them again in the common dish containing the ragodt or stew, and twiddles about the floating morsels, until he has selected a tid-bit to his taste. There are altogether some 40,000 of the pig-tailed people dwelling thus in the very centre of San Francisco ; and, albeit they are an industrious, peaceable, and interesting race, their deplorable social habits, and the way in which their cheap and resolute labour undersells that of the native-born Californians, render it certain that they must be some day or other de- ported, although the decree may breed trouble with the Government of the Vermilion Pencil. One of the most usual, but also most pleasant, excursions in the neighbourhood of San Francisco is through the Park to Cliff House, whence I had my very first gaze over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. All oceans look, of course, pretty much alike yet it cannot be without emotion that one sees for the first time even the verge of that vast water, which washes the continents of America, North and South, and of Asia, extends its pro- digious volume from Pole to Pole, and contains i 4 4 SEAS AND LANDS. all those lovely archipelagoes of the Southern Main s where the climate is as perfect as the islanders are charming, and where Nature on sea and land is at her best. It is a great temptation to turn aside southwards and visit Honolulu, only a week's voyage across yonder blue waves. But our steamer, the Belgic, is bound directly to Japan, and we must forego the attractions of these "Edens of the purple main." The Park, created from the bare sand of the peninsula overlooking " the Golden Gate," is beau- tiful and green with groves of blue gum, dwarf palms, aloes, cedar, pepper trees, and plentiful flowering shrubs. Crowds of happy people drive, ride, and walk out to the band-stand here, whence you can constantly hear the barking of the seals, which live upon two isolated rocks under the steep shore. Hundreds of these creatures sprawl on the ledges of the crags, or disport themselves in the billows great monsters, some black, some grey, some snowy white, safe in their sea fastness, and wisely protected by the Government. There is no other place on earth where the sight could be thus seen of the ocean-flocks of Neptune, placidly herded as if on a remote and unfrequented spot diving, fishing, sporting, and basking in the mild sunshine, without any fear of man. To the right opens the picturesque portal of the "Golden Gate," a mile wide between its posts of yellow sand, and always lively with vessels going and coming. It is the last point in our American wander- SAN FRANCISCO. 145 ings, and we shall see the shores fade behind us, with regrets due to that unbounded friendliness and faultless grace and goodness of which I have been the unworthy object in every city and at every stage of the journey. Of all this it would be improper, as it is impossible, adequately to write ; suffice it to observe that no language could ever express the sense which overwhelms me of the generosity and goodwill of Americans to one whom they have been pleased to regard as a friend. In quitting the continent I have published the subjoined, which is at once a farewell and an aspiration : SONNET OP ADIEU. America ! at this, thy Golden Gate, New-travelled from those green Atlantic coves, Parting I make my reverence ! It behoves With backward steps to quit a queen in state. Land ! of all lands most fair, and free, and great ; Land of those countless lips, wherefrom I heard Sweet speech of Shakespeare keep it consecrate For noble uses ! Land of Freedom's Bird, Fearless and proud ! So make him soar, that stirred By generous joy, all men may learn of thee A larger life ; and Europe, undeterred By ancient wrecks, dare also to be free Body and Soul ; seeing thine Eagle gaze Undazzled upon Freedom's Sun, full-blaze ! Truly it is difficult to limit the excursions of imagination in thinking what this splendid and wonderful State of California, and the Union gene- rally, may and must become in the way of material development and mass of population. Look at this K 146 SEAS AND LANDS. table, which shows the growth of the latter from the Revolution until to-dav : Year. Population. Increase in 10 years. Negro. Increase in 10 years. Per cent. Per cent. 1790 3,929,214 757,208 ... 1800 5,308,483 35-1 1,002,032 32.32 1810 7,239,88! 36.3 1,377,800 37-5 1820 9,633,822 33-i 1,771,656 28.65 1830 12,866,020 33-5 2,328,642 31-44 1840 17,069.453 32.6 2,873,648 23.40 1850 23,191,876 35-8 3,638,803 26.6 1860 31,443,321 35-6 4,441,830 22.1 1870 38,558,371 22.6 4,880,009 9-8 1880 50,155,000 36.0 6,580,000 34-8 1890 67,240,000 34-o 8,000,000 21.5 Average 33-46 Average 26.81 The population of 1790 thus became, in 1860, eight-fold, or 31,443,321, which is equivalent to doubling every 23 J years, and the American statis- tician calculates in 1900 for 77,100,000, and in 1950 for 103,314,000. He predicts in 1990 "all things being well" an American people numbering 1,206,400,000, with 86,957,000 coloured persons, and proceeds to say "Those who believe in the prospects here set forth will rule their undertakings and investments in the expectation that property in real estate must advance in the next half century ; that commerce and transportation and production must increase enormously. As the discoveries and inventions of science and industry make towns more and more healthful, convenient, interesting, and agreeable places of residence, our people will tend more SAN FRANCISCO. 147 and more toward them. Museums, libraries, public halls for the education and instruction and amuse- ment of the people, will be more and more numerous and cheap. The streets and parks will be embellished and made gay with public and private buildings. Electric engines will do the heavy work of the day. More time will be at the disposal of men for enjoyment, as these improve- ments relieve men and women from slavish toil for the means of living. ... In 1990 the urban population will be 240,000,000, and of these New York will probably contain over 30,000,000. What work for architects, contractors, builders, car- penters, masons, bricklayers, plasterers, brickmakers, quarriers, saw-mills, lime-kilns, sand-gatherers, roll- ing-mills, structural and roofing iron in sheets and beams, for tinners and roofers, and the thousand other trades, engaged in construction, not only of the 14,000,000 new homes, but of the markets, stores, warehouses, post-offices, court-houses, city- halls, gaols, penitentiaries, &c., necessary in the administration of an additional population equal to all that exists now on the Northern Continent ! " This is " spread-eagleism " with a vengeance ! But if you only saw what millions of sunny acres lie facing this Pacific sea-verge, how genial the climate is and how rich the soil, you would not wonder at the elated tone of Californians, nor doubt that a future of splendid prosperity must await the Union from the Western to the Eastern Ocean. To-morrow we take ship for Japan, embarking on 148 SEAS AND LANDS. the Belgic, a fine steamer of 5000 tons burden, for Yokohama, a voyage of about twenty days. We shall have a crew of Chinese sailors, and take no less than 860 Chinese passengers in the steerage, who are returning, with hoarded dollars, to the Flowery Land. It is but too certain that of this number a proportion will die upon the passage, and others will go crazy from the effects of too much opium and samshoo, nor can it be pretended that they are, personally, the most agreeable of fellow-passengers. But when properly treated Chinamen behave well enough, and our captain, an Englishman, has had experience in their management. We have also on board some man- darins, the suite of the unsuccessful Embassy to Washington, and it is darkly whispered that one or two of these are already in peril of decapita- tion at Pekin. They are courtly and agreeable gentlemen, however, and we must try, in such sad case, to render their closing days pleasant. It is not everybody who could be perfectly polite and chatty, as these almond-eyed diplomatists are, with "something humorous but lingering" impending over their red-buttoned caps all the way across the rolling Pacific ! SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16, 1889. CHAPTER XL THE PACIFIC. are two thousand miles from " anywhere," steaming swiftly over a lifeless expanse of dark blue waters, under a cloudless vault of palest blue sky. The nearest land is the Sandwich Island group, far away in the south, whence come softly sighing wafts of balmy breeze, which fill the wanderer with longings to put the head of the Belgic straight on for Honolulu, and to linger a season or two in the delightful archipelagoes of Polynesia. But we are bound right across this prodigious ocean for Yoko- hama, and the cities and temples of Japan ; on, perhaps, the longest voyage without stay or sight of land which passenger steamers take in any part of the globe. As it is the longest, so it is also the loneliest. The vessels which sail these seas for the lumber and grain of British Columbia, or the seals and walruses of Alaska, are scattered all far away to the northward along the thickening ice of Behring's Straits, and athwart the stormy arch of the Aleutian Islands. The San Francisco whalers, which cruise for the sperm oil yielded by the "right whale," are all far away to the southward among the atolls and coral reefs. We have not sighted a sail unless it 149 150 SEAS AND LANDS. be that of the nautilus or craft of any kind, through all these 5000 or 6000 miles of solitary salt waste, and shall not sight one until Satsuma Light twinkles from the hills of Japan, and the Gulf of Yokohama opens, with many a fishing boat and skimming sampan. What an immense isolation it is ! We are for many a day as much cut off from the living world in this our floating island as if we were an aste- roid gliding through the blue of interstellar space. The limitless, weltering, desolate, beautiful wilder- ness of rolling water affords no token, except our own passing shadow and the beat of our tire- less screw, that man is so much as existent upon the planet. The sapphire- coloured wave, cloven into a sudden furrow by our swift stem, closes up again astern in a milky, broadening wake, which fades away among the dancing crestlets of a slumbering sea, already forgetting that we have ever passed. Infinite silences of Nature are before us, and infinite solitudes behind, so that there are hours when it feels almost too bold a thing to launch forth into such measureless deserts of blue water, even with so powerful and capable a ship as the Belgic. What must it have seemed like to that grand old navigator, Captain James Cook, and his ships' com- panies, sailing these vast spaces of unknown sea in the little bluff-bowed brigs Endeavour and Reso- lute; yet month after month discovering fresh clusters of lovely islets, unnamed archipelagoes, New Zea- land, Australia a whole strange world of wonderful THE PACIFIC. 151 novelty ; or to Anson and his commodores, cruising the interminable azure of these expanses in search of the Spanish galleons, and slowly toiling home loaded with the doubloons of his Catholic Majesty, but with crews decimated by scurvy, and weather-beaten and weary ? The romance of those great days is gone, but with it also the hardships. We glide along over the pathless Pacific in a floating caravanserai carrying nearly 1000 souls, but in the utmost comfort, safety, and speed, accomplishing every three days nearly 1000 miles of pleasant run, independent of the winds which baffled those bygone mariners, so long at least as the propeller beats its ceaseless stroke upon the whitened waves under our stern-post. Yet it has only been during the last few days that the Pacific Ocean has justified its appellation. Our first week upon its bosom was one of wild and rest- less tossing and rolling for we left the Golden Gate in squalls of wind and rain, which continued long after it might have been expected that the influence of the Alaska storm-regions would have ceased. The Belgic is a very fine vessel of the White Star Line, registering 5000 tons, and constructed of steel, by those excellent builders, Messrs. Harland and Wolff, of Belfast, to whose unfailingly faithful work the voyager may always confidently trust himself. Long, and relatively somewhat narrow, she has a certain inclination to roll, sometimes even to a moderate beam sea, but has shown herself an ad- mirable sea-boat, and keeps up an average rate of twelve knots without canvas. At San Francisco, 152 SEAS AND LANDS. besides ninety saloon passengers, we shipped 870 home-going Chinese, berthed aft, on three decks, and packed one above the other in dense strata of Mongolian humanity. Our commander, Captain Walker, is an Englishman, and a navigator of great experience ; the officers are also English, but the crew to a man are Chinese, as also the stewards, and all the service of the ship. I am surprised to observe what capital seamen these Celestials make under good and just management. Captain Walker has had his company of pig-tailed sailors with him in this same vessel for four years, and they know their duty and perform it, in fair weather or foul, with an alacrity and skill not easily to be surpassed. The almond-eyed stewards are equally laudable. Always cheerful, willing, and industrious, they get through their never-ending task of feeding and serving us with an unchanging complacency which is quite delightful ; and my particular attendant, Ah- Fat, affords me special and endless amusement with his views of land and sea life expressed in " pidgin " English. " No makee raining, sun sine, plenty muchee good walkee topside ship," is his method of announcing fine weather at dawn, and recommending exercise upon deck. Preparing to extinguish the electric lamp, he briefly suggests, " No wantchee see now ; " and when I inquire why his countrymen so often come on board sick, and even at point of death, Ah-Fat murmurs the ex- planation, " Plenty you, perhaps, savee, but no savee bottom-side Chinaman mind. My very sick, more THE PACIFIC. 153 better kill board ship than kill San Francisco. Sup- pose my killed board ship, my put one piecey bokkus, all nice ; go China cheap." And such is the case. A consuming desire possesses the Celestial exile to have his bones laid in native earth, a desire rein- forced by religious doctrines and sanction. In every contract for foreign service it is stipulated by the Chinaman that the remains of the contracting party shall be conveyed if he dies to a Chinese grave. Those who depart life in California are temporarily interred by their friends, but only to be exhumed after a certain period and then packed up for expor- tation. The Pacific steamers are quite accustomed to accept and transmit these rather uncomfortable freights at of course a considerable charge, but generally ship them under the entry of " fish-bones." If the slant-eyed passengers are not closely looked after at embarkation, they will often bring all that is conveniently portable of a deceased friend or kins- man on board the ship in a portmanteau or tea-chest, " doing " not only the company, which is always a joy to the Celestial heart, but also their social duty, according to the maxims of Confucius. The boisterous week with which our long voyage opened worked, naturally, some woe aft among the 870 Chinamen. It was bad enough, midships, in the comfortable quarters of the saloon passengers, to have the great ship wallowing day by day, and night after night, in the gusty trough of the ocean, rolling her boats into the water, and taking the spray, and even the blue seas, on board, with heavy 154 SEAS AND LANDS. swashes, that shake the deck, and blinding blows dealt at the sturdy bows of the Belgic, making her long elastic fabric of thin but strong steel plating quiver like the skin of a wounded sea-serpent. It is bad enough, when you endeavour to dress for breakfast, to be hustled suddenly into your port- manteau ; and to have your brushes cast into the hand-basin, and your boots into the slop-tub ; to see the soup-plate sliding into your lap, despite the " fiddles," at dinner-time, and to be reduced at last to the mental and physical condition of a human pen- dulum. Even if not a victim of sea-sickness, this state of things becomes odious and humiliating for the stoutest traveller when it continues throughout six or seven whole days, as was our fate ; while for delicate women and children, and those who suffer badly from rough weather, it is about as miserable an experience, even in the best arranged and most commodious vessel, as travelling can well offer. But even to think of the condition of our Celestial fel- low-passengers during those long hours, when we were all " Rolled to larboard, rolled to starboard, in the seething of the sea," was to be thankfully reconciled to our own lot. The Belyic is so admirably managed, and the " ways of the heathen Chinee " are so perfectly understood and met on board such a ship, that there was nothing at all absolutely insanitary in that awful after-hold ; but the discomfort even for people accustomed to reside in the cellars of China Town THE PACIFIC. 155 must have been sometimes perfectly grim and Dantesque. The odours which ascended from the hatches, roofed over from rain and spray by tar- paulins, of themselves altogether forbade any per- sonal exploration ; but if imagination will picture 800 Chinamen packed three deep in bunks, and then conceive a series of close wet nights, and spray-driving days, with the huge vessel bounding like a porpoise, and shaking together into chaotic helplessness that crowd of pig-tailed people, it may partly realise the hidden picture. In the course of those first five or six nights two of the poor yellow-skinned folk gave up the business and the ghost together. They had come on board moribund, in the last stage of bodily weakness, and one of them was discovered dead in his bunk at early morning, while the demise of the other was generally announced to the ship one night by the howling of his immediate neigh- bours. Even Chinese do not like to have a corpse rolling against them with every lurch and pitch. The system pursued in all these cases is uniform. The company, having contracted to convey the body, alive or dead, provided the necessary fee be forthcoming, carries a quantity of ready-made coffins. One of these is handed up from below, and then the steward of the Chinese section de- mands the regulation thirty dollars for embalm- ing. It is seldom these are forthcoming from the dead man's own pockets, or stockings, or girdle, for though his comrades would not steal from an 156 SEAS AND LANDS. actually defunct person, some of them have few scruples about annexing the cash of a departing brother. Yet the bulk of them are fairly generous ; and, a tin dish being filled with burnt sugar, into which lighted joss-sticks are fixed, somebody goes round with it, inviting contributions. Every well- disposed Chinaman takes a pinch of the burnt sugar and drops into the dish a dime, a quarter, or a half- dollar, until the requisite sum is raised. Then the steward, or his assistant, opens the femoral artery of the deceased, and injects into the veins a strong preservative solution of carbolic acid, arsenic, and other chemicals. The corpse, thus pickled, is rolled in canvas, placed in one of the rough coffins, corded up, and lashed to the rail of the ship, with a papei tacked upon it, recording, in Chinese characters, the name and address of the hapless emigrant, who, in place of a passenger, has become part of the cargo. I have just inspected two of these sad packages, securely fastened abaft. Their whilom companions were sitting nonchalantly on the top of them, smoking little bamboo pipes, and playing dominoes. We expect, alas ! to have more demises as the voyage goes on, for several of the homeward- bound Celestials are very ill, albeit, fortunately, there is no epidemic or any general ill-health among their numbers. Our judicious captain, wisely perceiving that the northern or the central course across the Pacific would only entail head winds, strong seas, and slow daily runs, resolved to steer southwards to the 3ist THE PACIFIC. 157 parallel, and " pick up fair weather." This, there- fore, was ordered, and the Belgic, heading steadily on a south-westerly course, brought us on the seventh day of the voyage into a zone of far more pleasant seas and skies. Gloriously, indeed, for the three succeeding days was the Pacific engaged in rejustifying the appellation which had before appeared so frightfully misapplied. Under the in- fluence of blue weather above, and smooth water below, those turbulent hours became forgotten, when night after night the saloon passengers of the Belgic rolled from one side to the other of their narrow berths, or by day sate in melancholy rows along the deck-houses, with a life-line festooned round every neck or waist to keep chair and indi- vidual from sliding at each oscillation of the sea into the lee-scuppers. Dawns of delicious beauty were followed by noons of splendour, and by sun- sets of wonderful glory of colour and cloud-shapes as we ran along the soft parallel of 31.50, and so touched the upper edge of the golden Otaheitan zone. Far to the north, the heavens were still gloomy, no doubt, and the ocean restless ; but we had evaded the worst of those evil influences by our southerly demarche, and the happy difference was quickly visible from end to end of the good ship Belgic. The feeblest " sea-legs " on board became firm, chair-lashings were discarded, and games of deck-cricket, of shovel-board, quoits, and ring-the-pin were merrily pursued, while daring projects circulated among the younger ladies and 158 SEAS AND LANDS. gentlemen of dances under the new moon. Our pig-tailed passengers in the after-part of the vessel attributed the welcome change to the copious amount of joss-papers which they had flung over- board to propitiate the Goddess of Storms. When- ever the wind blows very hard the Mongolian voyagers believe that this deity is demanding another victim from their number, and they are wont to appease her wrath by casting forth in- numerable square pieces of gold and silver tissue paper, inscribed with prayers. Whether the god- dess accepted these, or whether we had run clear of the storm-zone, certainly for three whole days the Belgic bore us gaily and swiftly under skies realising Lord Tennyson's idea of what the Pacific should look like " A blaze upon the waters to the East ; A blaze upon the waters overhead ; A blaze upon the waters to the West." Comforted by such bright weather, the pig-tailed people came out into the sun from their dark and crowded bunks, and gave themselves to the delights of unlimited domino-playing, with shirt-buttons for counters, which they treasured in their shoes. The liveliest games were played in and about the " grave- yard," where the two defunct Chinamen reposed, duly corded, lashed, and ticketed. But there were only two dead out of nearly 900, and almost all the others were well, and cheerful at the rapid and even progress of the vessel. We logged a steady average THE PACIFIC. 159 of 300 miles a day, which, if not equal to Atlantic runs, would still bring us to Yokohama in twenty days, or thereabouts. This morning Ah-Fat has more lucidly explained to me why his countrymen are so desirous to have their remains conveyed to China, if they cannot reach it alive. " That number one piecey God-pidgin ! " he softly pointed out ; " suppose wantchee go topside, after kill, then wantchee family make chin-chin joss at grave. Suppose no takee bones, no makee grave, no speakee chin-chin joss, then not belong topside at all after kill ; belong Hellee." In other words, an immense value is attached by the Chinese to the prayers and offices of children for parents, and of kinsmen and posterity for their ancestors, and such prayers must be uttered in presence of the dead man's relics, or at the spot where they rest. Hence the extreme anxiety of the Celestial to lay his mortal part in the family soil ; nor is there anything which more potently tends to hold China together in her intense and exclusive nationality. Then we had bad weather again, which the joss- papers did not appear to diminish, with a tremen- dous beam sea from the north-east, upon which the JBelgic, largely lightened of coal by her passage of twelve or thirteen days, rolled recklessly and con- stantly. One lurch shipped a green sea into the galley and spoiled an entire dinner for the saloon. Another sent all the children of which we carried a large and lively consignment in one indis- tinguishable heap under the table of the "Social 160 SEAS AND LANDS. Hall," mingled inextricably, for some minutes, with playthings, toy-books, mothers, nurses, candy, and cushions. A third lurch at night unshipped the coffins wherein the dead Chinamen were making silent passage, and for a time flung these grim packages hither and thither about the flooded deck, one of them bursting open, so that the affrighted sailors had to chase and dodge the errant corpse up and down the lee-scuppers, and before it was repacked and re-lashed nearly lost it overboard. At table the plates and dishes overleap the fences of the " fiddle," soup flies about like spray, and avalanches of breaking crockery add to the uproar of the hissing waves and whistling wind. In the state- room the articles you thought were safely fastened break adrift and cruise round and round the floor all night, preparing for you in the morning a chaos of fruit, cigars, clean collars, and books, all mashed and jammed by the heavy portmanteaus which have sailed backwards and forwards through the dark hours. It is not a pleasant time ; but, through it all, the good ship plunges bravely forward ; the imperturbable, kindly, skilful captain never loses his quiet self-composure for an instant ; the purser is genial, gay, resourceful, indomitably attentive to his vast family ; and the Chinese crew do all their hard, wet work with ready alacrity, so that in the very worst of it you always hear ringing their not unmelodious sea-cry, " Ya-hoya-hoya-ho ! " and know that it will all come right and end in pleasant times again. THE PACIFIC. 161 And so it does ! Once more the Pacific slumbers, and once more the delicious days return when the merry group of fellow-travellers and officers, dis- cussing caviare sandwiches and dry champagne in the purser's cabin, or partaking tea and matchless Manilla cigars in the captain's own sanctum, might be yachting on the Solent for any sign that exists of a boundless ocean outside, or elemental perils in presence of whose anger the stout and strong Belgic herself would be but as a cockle-shell. Day after day the hours of gold and sapphire succeed each other, heralded by a rosy dawn, and closed in by a sunset of purple and amber. If the great vessel still moves to the sea, it is with a grave and rhythmical measure, to which everybody has grown accustomed ; but, indeed, there are now long intervals when she hardly curtseys at all in response to the gentle swell lifting the shining faces of the long sea-ridges. Everybody is grateful to Captain Walker for bringing his ship into these southern latitudes, even if it prolongs the voyage a little ; and, in simple truth, it is not possible to praise too warmly the management of the Belgic. The steamer is good and strong enough for any service, and is kept as neat and sweet as a first-class yacht. Her com- mander, without descending to become what is called a " saloon captain," is as kindly and considerate as he is firm and vigilant. The directors have had the wisdom to give us for purser the most important officer in a passenger ship after the commander a courteous gentleman, whose heart is in the work of L 102 SEAS AND LANDS. making everybody comfortable, and who understands and enjoys that work. Our voyage is a notable one in many points. Never has a Pacific steamer carried so full a list of saloon passengers, and but for signally admirable management we should be much inconvenienced. Mr. Magee, however, has skilfully organised double tables for breakfast and dinner, and his Chinese stewards do their increased duties with an alacrity so unfailing that even habitual grumblers are silenced. I believe this line is destined to become very popular, when the example of our present voyage is followed by the " Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company," which is a branch of the Great Southern Pacific Railway Company, under the general management of a gentleman well known, Mr. F. Crocker. It will be wise policy of the Government to adopt this southern road definitely to touch regularly at Honolulu, going and coming, thus picking up Australian and Polynesian pas- sengers and goods, and furnishing a regular and pleasant route across the vast Pacific. I find it altogether impossible to acknowledge too warmly the excellence of the service, the carefulness and liberality of the control, or the constant efforts on the part of our captain, our purser, and " all hands," to render the prodigious journey pleasant, safe, and harmoniously social. On the iSoth meridian we "hove a day over- board." Monday, October 28, was for us a dies non, erased wholly from our calendar in order to square the ship's time with that of the sun, whose course THE PACIFIC. 163 we had been diurnally overrunning. Thus we skipped gaily from Sunday to Tuesday, and all of us may boast that there has been one day at least in our lives upon which we neither said nor did a word or act to be regretted. 0! si sic omnes! Animated by the fine weather, some of our ladies, on one of the lovely moonlight nights of latitude 3 1 .o, dazzled us by appearing at dinner in fancy dress. One wore a bewitching Japanese costume of gauzy silk ; another the mantilla and skirt of a Spanish senora ; a third had donned the robes of a lady of the Court of Louis XIV. ; yet another was powdered and patched a la Queen Anne; and a Chicago dame, comely, bright, and lively as the important character demanded had formed a charm- ing garb out of the ship's biggest " stars and stripes," and, with the help of a diadem of pasteboard, adorned with stars cut from tin-foil, and bearing the word " Liberty " emblazoned in the same material across her bosom, played majestically the part of " Columbia." Afterwards we had dancing to a late hour on deck, with singing, and all sorts of maritime " high jinks ; " that wonderful engine amidships beating its ceaseless measure day and night, fair and foul, whether we slept or awoke, dined, danced, or flirted. Once only, in the entire traject, the machinery suddenly stopped ; and the effect was as though an event had happened to the Universe, so much had that never-pausing pulse of the ship become part of our bodily sensations. There was something out of order with the steam-chest, and it 164 SEAS AND LANDS. was "pretty to see" as Mr. Pepys would have put it how smartly the chief engineer and his staff whipped off the cover of the chest, wheeled the crane over it, slung the great metallic mass into the air, and put matters right so that within two hours efficiency was restored, and the systole and diastole of the JBelgic's iron heart once again beat regularly. For the use of future Pacific travellers to all whom I wish as prosperous a voyage, as good a vessel, and as agreeable a company of officers the log is here appended : VOYAGE NINETEENTH OF S.S. BELGIC. SAN FUANOISCO TO YOKOHAMA. Left Dock Oct. 17. Oct. Wind. Force. Sea. Lat. Long. W. Run. 18 Variable. 3 Confused. 37-45 127.20 230 '9 Variable. 5 Heavy. 37-50 133-22 286 20 Westerly. 7 Heavy. 37-3i 138.33 248 21 W.N.W. 7 to 3 High swell. 35-52 142.52 250 22 Westerly. 7 Heavy. 33-52 147-^6 277 23 N.N.W. 5 Strong. 32-25 I53.42 302 2 4 N. 3 Moderate. 3i-43 159-43 309 25 Variable. 2 Smooth. 31-27 165.36 302 26 S.S.W. 3 Smooth. 31-14 I7L34 306 2? w. 4 Smooth. 31-14 177.22 298 [Day dropped.] I.o,,g. E. 29 Variable. 5 Confused. JW4 176.32 304 30 E.KE. . 7 Heavy. 3LI4 170.44 297 Nov. Variable. 4 Smooth. 31-27 164.41 310 I Westerly. 2 Smooth. 32.0 I59.I7 277 2 Westerly. 3 Smooth. 32-49 15344 287 3 N.N.W. 4 Smooth. 33-3^ 148.0 292 4 N. 5 High sea. 34-0 142.40 310 Yokohama Light distant 142 miles. And now the long voyage over this vast watery wilderness, which had so many possible perils, is THE PACIFIC. 165 happily terminating ! We have sighted Cape King, passed along the ten miles of intervening Japanese shore, and entered the long inlet, lined with green hills and little toy-box huts, which leads to Yoko- hama. The waters, strangely placid after the stiff nor'-wester blowing down upon us all yesterday, from Jesso and Saghalien, are alive with little fishing craft and vessels of all nations. It is Japan ! the Land of Gentle Manners and Fantastic Arts. We are going ashore ! (1ni.v OF YOKOHAMA, Nov. 5, 1889. CHAPTER XII. JAPAN. ARRIVING at night in a strange country, one always wonders what the daytime will disclose. It dawned on a scene of singular charm and beauty. Far and near, over the placid surface of " Mississippi Bay," as the inlet is called upon which Yokohama stands, rode at anchor a whole fleet of merchant ships of large tonnage, steam and sailing, seven or eight powerful men-of-war of various nationalities inter- spersed among them, Her Majesty's vessels Severn and Wanderer being of the number. Amidst, and around, and beyond these, scores of native fishing craft, with square sails of many hues, traversed the bay, while hundreds of " sampans"- light rowing boats, constructed of broad planks of pine skimmed the quiet sea, propelled after the manner of Venetian gondolas, by two long stern oars, which are worked under water with a sculling movement by the lively little brown-skinned watermen. The white hulls of the men-of-war, the black mail steamers, the brown and yellow native craft with variously tinted sails, the fluttering ensigns of many nations amid which the Japanese flag of red and white was every- where conspicuous filled the fair marine picture 166 JAPAN. 169 with bright points of colour, and beyond the thickly-peopled water lay the picturesque town, planted on what was once a marsh, between two " bluffs," or ranges of hills, running inland. Here was Japan at last, the country which surprises and fascinates everybody who visits it the " Kingdome of Japonia," as the old authors styled it and of which good Master Will Adams, its discoverer for English people, wrote " This iland of lapon is a great land, and lyeth to the northwards, in the lattitude of eight and fortie degrees, and it lyeth east by north, and west by south or west south west, two hundred and twentie English leagues. The people of this iland of lapon are good of nature, curteous aboue measure, and valiant in warre ; their iustice is seuerely executed without any partialitie vpon transgressors of the law. They are gouerned in great ciuilitie. I meane, not a land better gouerned in the world by ciuil policie. The people be verie superstitious in their religion, and are of diuers opinions." We could hardly have patience enough for breakfast on board the Belgic, so much did the shore and the prospect of setting foot in the spacious city before our eyes excite the imagination. But the Japanese authorities are particular and punctilious. It was necessary to get a clean bill of health, and to fulfil all for- malities, after which a steam-launch conveyed us, " bag and baggage," to the steps of the Custom House, which we passed with little or no trouble, and found ourselves with gait unsteadied by the i7o SEAS AND LANDS. ceaseless movements of the Pacific waves safe, sound, and well pleased on the soil of the " Land of Gentle Manners." Everybody has read and heard so much of Japan, by this time, and seen so many photographs of its people and places, that it cannot seem quite so novel, so astonishing to the modern traveller, as it was to Will Adams and his weather-beaten crew, when they came to " Nangasaque " and saw those scenes which the old seaman describes so well " Then wee steered north north-west, and soone after came foure great fisher-boats aboord, about fine tunnes apeece in burthen, they sailed with one saile, which stood like a skiffe saile, and skuld with foure oares on a side, their oares resting vpon a pinne fastned on the toppe of the boats side, the head of which pinne was so let into the middle part of the oare that the oare did hang in his iust poize, so that the labour of the rower is much lesse then otherwise it must be ; yet doe they make farre greater speed then our people with rowing, and performe their worke standing as ours doe sitting, so that they take the lesse roome." And again "The king came aboord and brought foure chiefe women with him. They were attired in gownes of silke, clapt the one skirt ouer the other, and so girt to them, barelegged, only a paire of halfe buskins bound with silke reband about their instep ; their haire very blacke, and very long, tyed vp in a knot vpon the crowne in a comely manner : their heads no where shauen as the mens were. They were JAPAN. i 7 r well faced, handed, and footed ; cleare skind and white, but wanting colour, which they amend by arte. Of stature low, but very fat ; very curteous in behaiour, not ignorant of the respect to be giuen vnto persons according to their fashion. The kings women seemed to be somewhat bashfull, but he willed them to bee frolicke. They sung diuers songs, and played vpon certain instruments (whereof one did much resemble our lute) being bellyed like it, but longer in the necke, and fretted like ours, but had only foure gut strings. Their fingring with the left hand like ours, very nimbly, but the right hand striketh with an iuory bone, as we vse to playe vpon a citt^rne with a quill. They delighted much with their musicke, keeping time with their hands." People talk of Japan as already half-Europeanised, but within a couple of hours after our landing I had seen the quaint letters of the " Ancient Mariner " of Gillingham illustrated in twenty particulars, and found that, like all the rest of Asia, Japan has caprices of fashion, but never really changes. Even here, where the Old and New Worlds throng Yoko- hama Gulf with shipping, and you may hear nearly every known tongue spoken upon the Bund, a walk of half an hour takes you away to scenes and customs which are as old as the beginning of the Christian Era, and older still. Under the thickest lacquer of new ways, the antique manners and primitive Asiatic beliefs survive of this curious and delightful people, in whose veins Mongol and Malay 172 SEAS AND LANDS. blood has mingled to form an utterly special and unique race. How is it possible to convey a tithe of those first impressions of strangeness and vivid interest with which the streets of even cosmopolitan Yokohama fill the observant new-comer? Look at these road- ways, moistened with a recent shower ! Nowhere else in the world would you see the mud marked witli such curious tracks innumerable transverse lines, parallel and sharply impressed, as if a goffer- A JAPANESE LAUY. JAPAN. 175 ing roll had passed everywhere along. These are the footprints of the geta, the wooden clogs which all Yokohama wears on wet days ; and that noise, like the voices of very loud crickets, is produced by the pit-a-pat of thousands of geta, on the spots where the causeways are paved with stone or pebbles. Plunge into the cheery, chattering, polite, and friendly crowd going and coming along the Benten Dori, and it is as if you were living on a large painted and lacquered tea-tray, the figures of which, the little gilded houses, the dwarf trees, and the odd landscape, suddenly jumped up from the dead plane into the living perpendicular, and started into busy being. Here, too, are all the pleasant little people you have known so long upon fans and screens. Take the first that comes along this tiny Japanese lady, whom you left, as you thought, on the lid of the glove -box at home. Tripping along upon her waraji, she wears that kimono of puce-coloured silk with the white storks, which you so well remember, the obi of amber and blue satin, tied round her little body and swelling into enormous puffed bows behind " She's a little bit thick in the waist, the waist ; But then she was never once laced, ouce laced ! " Her snow-white socks, which only just cover the little foot, are divided into a private room for the great toe, and a parlour for the little toes, which gives her the air of being a little pigeon with white feet ; and she waddles prettily, somewhat like a 7 6 SEAS AND LANDS pigeon. The kimono is folded demurely across her little bosom, and her long sleeves hang down from the small brown wrists and arms to her knees. In these receptacles she keeps sheets of soft tough paper, with which she blows her small nose and A COUNTRY GIRL. wipes the dust from her dainty skirts, besides innumerable other articles of constant use, such as her cards, her chop-sticks, perhaps her special porcelain cup for tea. She has the little clear-cut almond eyes which the artist so faithfully depicted, JAPAN. 177 the funny little nose " adpressus"- flattened into the little rosy, laughing face, which presents a lovely mouth with the whitest shining teeth, full curving lips, and dimpled chin, and amber-coloured neck and throat losing themselves softly in the tender folds of the kimono. Her hands are small and fine, the little nails veritable rose-leaves ; and in her glossy hair she wears a red camellia with ever so many little fantastic pins stuck up and down the smooth waves of it. But there is where the artist of the fan and glove-box failed. His palette had not any black pigments black enough to represent the night-dark depths of the tresses of the Japanese girl. Those puffed and perfumed bandeaux of oiled coiffure, so carefully dressed, and arranged so that no single hair strays from the rigid splendour of the toilette room, would make a jetty spot on the heart of midnight. So black that the very highest lights of it are blue-black beyond inky blackness, black so that ebony would be grey beside it, the glittering tenebrosity of it makes her little visage and her little nape and throat emerge like dyed ivory from the contrast. Then the Kuruma-ya, the jinrikisha men ! Much as you have heard and read about them, you will almost die with laughter when you call one from the stand where the little machines are ranged like fairy hansom cabs, and start for your first ride. With a hat on his shaggy head like a white washing-basin, with a red or blue blanket over his shoulders, his little legs tightly encased in black cloth drawers, his M 178 SEAS AND LANDS. feet thrust into straw sandals, his name and number gaily painted on his back, " San-ju-ban," or what- ever else his ticket proclaims him, starts off at a run with the ridiculous perambulator into which you have entered, and whisks you here, there, and everywhere for fifteen cents, his little hoofs twink- ling between the slender shafts, bedecked with bands of tin-foil. On all sides, as you walk about Yokohama, the cry will be heard from the Kuruma stands of " Sha, Sha!" answering to the London "Keb, sir!" and, should you have picked up a little of the language, the polite phrases of the two- legged steed will be a good sample of " honorific Japanese." " If the honourable lord does not give himself the trouble of much illustrious delay, the fare will only be 20 sen. Condescend to make gracious use of this worthless servant ! " Then the children. Japan is evidently a Paradise for babies and boys and girls. The babies are one and all slung upon the back in a deep fold of the kimono. There they sleep, eat, drink, and wobble their little shaven pates to and fro, with jolly little beaming visages, and fat brown hands and arms. The children are friends of everybody, and play ball and fly kites in the most crowded thoroughfares, never rebuked, never ill-treated, with grave happy ways, and long flowing robes, which give a certain quaint dignity to even the youngest. Coolies go about carrying huge burthens on balanced bamboo baskets ; fishermen hawk odd-looking piscine speci- JAPAN. 179 mens in white tubs ; the blind amma, or shampooer, wanders up and down tootling a plaintive note upon a double pipe of reed, to notify that he is ready to knead and pummel anybody troubled with rheumatism ; the isha, or physician, passes with his THE BABY. drug-case hitched into his waistband by an ivory netske; the miller, standing naked behind the string-screen of his shop, grinds rice between two stones, his brown limbs powdered with the fine Hour ; the bath-man lifts the blue cloth curtain i8o SEAS AND LANDS. of his establishment, and begs you to " make honourable entrance." If you do you will see all sorts and conditions of men and women too amicably tubbing together, and will be yourself invited to disrobe and sit in a tub, which will scald you, if not heedful, for the Japanese take their, baths at nearly the temperature which boils an egg. And the little shops, and the little goods, and the little, funny, impossible articles bought and sold ; and the little, placid, pleasant folk laughing and trotting about the ways ; and the little trees grow- ing in every nook, and the little absurd cakes and little morsels of food, and little cups and little bowls which they use. I know I abuse this adjec- tive " little," but all in Japan is chisai, choito, except the shrimps which are colossal and the sea, and the mountains. But the word "mountains" reminds me of Fuji- San, and one ought to speak first of this prodigious and renowned eminence, which is clearly visible from many spots in Yokohama. So, for the present, I leave the ever-wonderful population of the Japanese towns and pay tribute of distant respect to sublime "Fuji." The highest mountain in Japan, it stands between the provinces of Suruga and Kai. Its height is variously stated at 12,234 English feet, 12,365 feet, and 13,287 feet. According to the ancient Japanese legend, Fuji arose in a single night, while the Biwa Lake, near Kioto, was formed simultaneously. Eruptions are mentioned as having taken place in the years 799, 864, 936, 1082, 1649, JAPAN. '83 and 1707. The last began December 16, 1707, and continued till January 22, 1708. On this occasion the hump called Ho-yei-zan, on the upper slope of the south side of the mountain, was formed. Mount Fuji stands by itself, rising with one majestic sweep A MUSl'Mfi. from a plain which is almost surrounded by ranges of mountains. The southern side curves down to the sea, its graceful line being only broken on the south-east by the rugged peaks of Ashidaka-yama. The ascent can be made from five different points, 1 84 SEAS AND LANDS. viz., Murayama, Suyama, Subashiri, Yoshida, and Shito-ana. The slope of the mountain is richly cul- tivated with rice, tea, tobacco, millet, and various vegetables, and higher up the paper plant, mitsumata (Edgeworthia papyrifera) abounds. Although in the present day it is not necessary to obtain permission before making the ascent, still a certain amount of etiquette attaches itself to the formal ceremony of opening the mountain on the first day of the eighth moon. Car earliest glimpse of this famous volcano, the finest peak of its kind in the world, was obtained from the " 101 steps." At the top of these steps, beyond the Creek of Yokohama, is a Tea House, known to all, called "Fujiya," or the "Abode of the Wistaria." We had repaired thither to drink the little cups of pale yellow beverage for which the Japanese have so refined a passion, and to nibble the little yellow and red cakes, and smoke the little brass pipes, while chatting with C Take San, the agreeable Lady of the Establishment. We had finished a repast, calculated to stay the appetite, perhaps, of a butterfly, or a Japanese ; had heard the music of the " samisen," and some less abstruse melodies, among them a song composed to a Yoko- hama belle by an American officer, of which here are two verses " I strive to make love, but in vain, in vain, My language, I know, is not plain, not plain, Whenever I try, She says, 'Go men nasai Watakshi wakarimasen-masen.' * * " Deign honourably to excuse me, but I do not understand." THE HUNDRED AND ONE STEPS, YOKOHAMA. JAPAN. 187 She plays on the soft 'samisen,' 'samisen,' She sings me a song now and then and then, And when I go away She sweetly will say, ' Sayonara ! ' ' Do, please, come again again.' " Our " afternoon tea " was concluded, the shoji (a screen of frame and paper) was drawn back, we resumed our shoes, and with many a " O yasumi nasai ! " and " Sayonara ! " proceeded to descend the " loi steps." It was nearly sunset, and lo ! half-way down, in the rosy west, suddenly we spied the glorious hill raising its sharply pointed cone, all brilliant with snow, above the belt of light grey and rosy clouds which lay along the horizon. Although sixty or seventy miles distant, the giant peak stood forth plain as a silhouette of silver upon the golden background of the western heavens. It was good to behold Fuji-San the " Lady of Mountains " so soon after arrival, and no wonder could be felt, even from that dim and remote vision, that the Japanese revere their beautiful and isolated volcano. In- numerable are the legends attaching to it. On the summit dwells a deity the Guardian God of the Crater who is styled " O-ana-Mochi no Mikoto," the " Protector of the Great Hole." The sand brought down during the daytime by the feet of many pilgrims reascends of itself during the night. On the fifteenth day of the sixth moon the snow all disappears from the summit for twelve hours, to make the visit of the goddess " Fuji-Seu-Gen " perfectly convenient ; and reappears the following day quite punctually. The smoke of Fuji, her 1 88 SEAS AND LANDS. snows, her green girdle of canes and vines, her feet sandalled with flowers, her bosom from which issue streams fertilising the plains, her perfect con- tour, her majestic beauty, fill Japanese poetry with passionate themes of eulogy and adoration. One native bard exclaims " What words can tell, what accents sing Thine awful grandeur? 'Tis thy breast Whence Fuzugawa's wavelets spring, Where Narusana's waters rest." Divine, truly, in majesty and grace rose the tall peak, about the precise height of which in feet and metres it seems almost impious to dispute, when the living lovely vision of this mountain once comes in sight. For days and weeks together the clouds often shroud that splendid cone, and you can only know where Fuji-San stands by the masses of cumuli and cumulo-strati gathered about her from the Pacific Ocean at -her foot. All the more happy did we feel to catch a glance of the Goddess on the third day of our sojourn in Japan. The omen was good, and we mounted our jinrikishas and trundled home through the twinkling paper lanterns and busy little streets, with the resolve to see Fuji presently close at hand, even though the season should forbid the ascent of its sublime slopes. YOKOHAMA, Nov. 8, 1889. CHAPTER XIII. A JAPANESE CITY. WE are on English soil again, for a time, being the happy guests of the British Minister and Mrs. Eraser, at Her Britannic Majesty's Legation in Tokio, the capital city of Japan, formerly known as Yeddo. The run by railway from Yokohama is short but inte- resting. The carriages are of the English pattern ; the names of the stations are painted up in English as well as in Japanese, and the eighteen miles of fiat country are traversed in about three-quarters of an hour. In quitting Yokohama you pass under a large Shinto Temple, arid skirt the fishing town of Kanagawa (" The Metal River "), where foreigners were first settled. Then you come to Tsurumi (" Place to See Storks "), surrounded by extensive rice-fields, in which the people were reaping the ripe stalks and hanging them in circular- shaped sheaves upon the stems of the trees, so that every hedge-row presented a most curious appearance with these lines of swathed trunks. Tobacco grew green and plentiful everywhere, with patches of onions and of those gigantic radishes which the Japanese so much affect. Kawasaki (" River-Bend ") is next passed, where numberless cargo-boats thatched with I 9 2 SEAS AND LANDS. mats, and gliding sampans, driven by big-handled oars, testify to a lively water traffic. The boat- women work and row with their babies tied upon their backs, the little black round heads and doll- like eyes wagging and winking behind the totally unconcerned mother. Omori (" The Great Forest") succeeds, but its trees have mainly disappeared, though Kamada, close by, is famous for its plum- blossoms in April. The love of the people for flowers is one of their many charming traits. We are too late, or too early, for the red and white lotuses, the tree- peonys, and the golden lilies, which, with the jasmines and roses, embellish the spring and autumn lakes and fields ; but it is the cream of the season for the chief blossom of Japan, her imperial symbol the chrysanthemum ; and truly, splendid are the displays seen of this many-hued and multiform flower. Half the women wear a purple or amber pompone in their hair or bosom, and one of our objects in coming at once to Tokio is to be present at the annual exhibition of chrysan- themums, held in the Emperor's gardens. Passing Ikegami ("The Upper Lake"), we next see a famous temple, dedicated to the ancient Buddhist saint, Nichiren, and another sacred to Daikoku, the God of Wealth and Good Fortune, whose highly comic picture sitting upon bags of rice which rats are busily gnawing figures on all the one and five yen bank-notes current in Japan. The jocund spirit of the people manifests itself even in these grave A JAPANESE CITY. 193 matters of finance. They will not and cannot take either life or religion au grand serieux. Another ornamental shrine hereabouts, rich with lacquer and carvings, is raised in honour of Mioken, the Pole- Star. And thus our train comes to Shinagawa (" River of Merchandise "), at the head of the Gulf a place mainly populated by fishermen, who catch and sell extraordinary quantities of odd-looking fish, and of those gigantic blue shrimps already observed. The line now curves round, through suburbs of the metropolis, styled respectively, Mita ("The Three Fields") and Shimbashi ("The New Bridge") ; and then we are in the station of Tokio, a really vast city, nine miles long and eight miles wide, con- taining over a million inhabitants, the seat of Government, as well as of the Shiro, or Castle, wherein resides His Imperial Majesty the Mikado. This Shiro, with its huge ramparts of cyclopean masonry and wide moats full of wild fowl, banked by lofty slopes of grass and rows of ancient trees is one of the perpetually striking features of Tokio While driving or riding in a jinrikisha you are always entering or leaving its massive gateways, guarded by neat little soldiers, and capped with Chinese -looking gate -houses. The broad moats swarm with fish, as well as with teal, widgeon, and duck, but nobody is permitted to angle or shoot there. Tokio gives the impression of being mainly a bigger Yokohama, without the beautiful sea view, albeit it possesses its own maritime quarter, and is N 194 SEAS AND LANDS. washed there by the head of the Gulf, into which runs the River Sumida, Yet the interminable thoroughfares present a far fuller stream of life, and even more surprising novelties than the seaport. Nothing but an instantaneous photograph, carefully coloured, could impart even an idea of the pictur- esque population of the Nakadori or of Ginza Street. The trundling jinrikishas; the little shock-headed Japanese in dark blue coats and tight trousers ; the tiny womenkind with hair banded and brushed into fantastic, glossy, immovable coiffures ; the mothers with the slit-eyed babies lashed upon their backs so like to dolls that you almost look for the wire wherewith to make them wink and squeak ; the smart little soldiers in brick-red breeches ; the immacu- lately gloved policemen ; the postmen in soup-plate hats running along with letter-bags ; the endless clatter of the innumerable wooden pattens ; the shuffling of the countless waraji ; the slow, shaggy oxen dragging the bamboo waggons ; the pretty, grave, delightful, happy children, racing along the public way, with flowing sleeves, like those of a Master of Arts, and flowers in their hair, or flying kites of astonishing devices, or clambering about the stone gods and demons of some Buddhist temple, or broadly and blandly staring at the foreigner with languid almond eyes and little painted mouths wide open ; the fishermen, with specimens of piscine natural history which make mermaids commonplace, and sea-serpents appetising ; the gigantic radishes ; the absurd English inscriptions on the sign-boards ; A JAPANESE CITY. 197 the funny small shops, with their hanging screens of blue cloth and reeds ; the squatting shopkeepers ; the cakeman with his tinkling bell ; the blind amma or shampooer ; the small black and white houses, ranged in endless rows as if out of a wooden toy-box, with paper fronts and sliding shoji ; the tootling of the tram car horns ; the spick and span musumes tripping, with shining tresses and pigeon-feet, to dance or to dinner ; the startling things in toyshops, and restaurants, and " butcheries " where badgers, wild boars, and silver pheasants are hanging up at the poulterers', beside ducks, and snipe, and hares ; the great kites and noisy crows sweeping round and round above the traffic of the bazaar, and at the four- cross way, where a long vista opens westward, Fuji's grand and perfect peak sixty miles off, towering above the rosy clouds of sunset, lifting itself to our far-off gaze in such majesty of form and colour as no other mountain in the world possesses a sight that puts on the other sights, as it were, the Creator's own mark when He made this wonderful, delightful, unique, and mysterious Japan. Dark blue, dark grey, puce, purple, and black em- broidered with white, are the leading colours of the autumn dresses of the Japanese out of doors, so that the general aspect of the moving crowd is not so variegated as the throng of an Indian town presents. But a happier-looking population can nowhere be studied ; they go chattering and laughing along, the porters singing between their balanced burdens, the air all full, far or near, of pretty salutations " O 198 SEAS AND LANDS. hayo ! O hayo gozaimas ! " or "Sayonara! sayonara !" and at evening, " O yasumi nasai ! " (" Condescend to take honourable repose ! "). The deep reverences these little people make to each other in the street are charming for grace and apparent goodwill the commonest coolie bends with the air of a finished teacher of deportment when he meets a friend or accepts an engagement. Indoors the obeisances are more lowly still. The little foreheads touch the earth or the spotlessly clean mats, and the little hands, almost always exquisitely formed are spread out, while the' kneeling musume prostrates herself and musically utters the irrashai! The children in the streets are for ever breaking into a dancing run for pure glee of existence, clattering along in merry groups upon their wooden clogs. Or else they gather at street corners and play softly boisterous games with each other, singing songs and beating hands to the tune. I secured the words of one of these, where the little brown-eyed, black-pated, Japa- nese babies stood in a ring, and swung their hands first outwards and then inwards, simultaneously. It seems they were thus alternately imitating the open- ing and the closing of flowers, expanding the circle at the word " hiraita " (" opened "), and contracting it at " tzubonda " (" closed "). This joyous little street song, in the vernacular, was "Hiraita ; hiraita ! Nanno hana hiraita? Renge no hana hiraita, Hiraita to omottara, mata tsubonda. A JAPANESE CITY. 199 Tsubonda; tsubonda Xanno hana tsubonda 1 Renge no hana tsubonda Tsubonda to omottara, mata hiraita." Which is, being interpreted " Opened ! opened ! Which is the flower has opened ? The lotus-flower has opened. You thought so, but now it is shut. Shut ! Close shut ! Which is the flower that's shut? 'Tis the lotus blossom that's folded. You thought so, but now it expands !" There is another graceful nursery rhyme that the dark- eyed Japanese babies sing in the streets, which goes " Chocho ! Chochd ! Na no ha ni tomare Xa no ha ni akitara Yoshi no ha ni tomare." And this, again, in English as simple, is "Butterfly, butterfly! Light on the rape and feed ; If you are tired of honey there, Fly to the flower of the reed." But the place of places in Tokio to see the Japanese small folk is Asakusa, a quarter where a kind of permanent fair is established round the eminently popular temple of Kin Riu Zan. In this large 'and striking edifice is preserved a small image of the Goddess Kwannon Sama, made of pure gold, which 200 SEAS AND LANDS. was hauled up in a net from the Sumida River, and is too sacred ever to be publicly exhibited. The shrine is naturally a favourite one with fishermen, but all classes frequent it, and curious it is to stand within the sanctuary and watch the naivete of the worshippers. They go first to a little hut, and pay an infinitesimal coin for leave to wash their hands and mouths with water from a wooden ladle, for it would not be right to go unpurified to pray. Then they pick out the particular incarnation in the great fane which suits their need, for one image is good at curing stomach-aches, another at bringing fish into the net, a third in making fair weather at sea, and a fourth figure in wood which will accord a becoming complexion if you stroke its face, has that countenance now completely rubbed flat and feature- less by the innumerable palms of women and girls coming thither to benefit by the goddess. With hands and lips washed, the votary pulls a bell-rope which is to awaken the attention of the deity. Then he throws a coin or two into a grated re- ceptacle, joins his fingers together, breathes the supplication or whispers the wish, and afterwards claps his hands to let the divinity know that the affair is terminated, and that others can take their turn. There is a pagoda near the temple, which is approached by a stone-paved walk. On both sides of this stand bright little shops for the sale of toys, ornaments, &c. The huge red building at the entrance contains two gods of colossal size, A JAPANESE CITY. 201 in large niches, protected by iron screens. They are the tutelary guardians of the gate, and are called " Ni-O " ( " Two Kings " ). One stands ready to welcome those who repent of their sins and determine to lead new lives ; the other is the special god of children. The tame pigeons flying about are held sacred ; and to give pious people an opportunity to feed them, women sell peas or rice in little earthenware pots. The Japanese do not visit Asakusa for pious motives only, but for pleasure also. Hence within the temple grounds are theatres, archery galleries, tea booths, and a variety exhibition of birds, beasts, and dwarfed trees. A white lath and plaster model of Fuji-San rises near, about 110 feet in height and 1000 feet in circumference. Large numbers ascend to the top daily, some days as many as 6000. All the paved way leading to the vast painted temple is full of toyshops, and all the small people of Tokio seem to repair thither on foot, or rocking about upon the maternal back. The clattering of the wooden clogs, the blasts of tin trumpets, the flutter of flags and toy balloons, the laughter, the chatter, the gossip of brown matrons comparing their brown babies and their home experiences, the good temper and dolce far niente of Asakusa in the afternoon, are things to remember. Here, too, as in other quarters at the present season, there are chrysanthemum shows, and the natives will spend all spring and summer in training the vines and growing the flowers for the exhibition, 202 SEAS AND LANDS. to which the visitor is charged about one cent. Each show contains two or three booths, fitted np with figures to illustrate some historical or tradi- tional theme, and the chrysanthemum blossoms have been attached so as to constitute natural robes and scenic accessories. Sometimes a whole fable will be thus illustrated by means of several dis- tinct floral tableaux. The skill displayed by these THE TOKIO CAB. Japanese florists is abundantly entertaining ; but the most striking objects are always those dwarfed and twisted trees which they know how to produce, so that, like the Chinese, they can carry about a fir or thuja, or plum tree, sixty or eighty years old, in a small flower-pot. This is obtained with infinite patience by pinching off the rootlets week by week, and nipping and training the ends of the branchlets A JAPANESE CITY. 203 till the tree is stunted into the exact likeness of a giant of the forest, while it will not measure, per- haps, more than twenty-four inches high. Then they dot these pigmy timber trees all about a tiny artificial hill, and plant all over it miniature rocks and crags, and dig out fairy-like lakes, and lead hither and thither absurdly pretentious little rivers, which, for their bridges, cataracts, and rapids, might be the Nile, the Missouri, or the Orinoco ; and near at hand they rear a delicious little tea-house, and sit there sipping ridiculously small doses of sake, from thimble-like cups, nibbling such tiny biscuits as might satisfy the appetite of a butterfly, smoking microscopic pipes of brass and bamboo, which hold about three whiffs, and generally thus looking upon life through a reversed telescope, and making deli- cate and friendly fun out of all its aspects. If Buddhism had only come straight to Japan, instead of dribbling thither through the mud of China and the snows of Corea, this would be the kingdom where its influence would show best and brightest ! We have just shared in the honour and plea- sure of a visit to the Legation, from the Countess Kur6da, wife of the ex-Prime Minister of Japan, a charming and accomplished native lady. Her dress, except for the richness of its soft material, was quiet in colour and cut, almost to Quakerism, but upon her long hanging sleeves of grey were embroidered in white silk the arms and badge of one of the greatest Satsuma houses. She talked the gentle flowing Japanese, which has no gutturals, 204 SEAS AND LANDS. no aspirates, no high or hard inflections and accents (and unhappily no letter L), in the usual honorofic style, depreciating herself and her belongings, and exalting those whom she addressed, what she said being deftly interpreted by the English lady attend- ing her. Inviting us to her house, which is one of the handsomest, it is said, in Tokio, she was careful to declare it "a poor place, unworthy of such visitors," and, in taking leave, begged " to be excused for wasting, by her totally unimportant speech and presence, the honourable time of her dear friends." Her husband, the Count Kuroda, has just yielded office to Prince Sango, of the Jiu- Shiu party, the Conservatives of Japan ; and there is something like a crisis, in truth, in the political world of Tokio just now, saddened, as we are, by the attempted assassination of one of the foremost of Japanese statesmen. I am told that, with all their good qualities and bonhomie, the Japanese are a very capricious people to govern, easily grow- ing tired of a new man or measure. An immense experiment is impending at Tokio the installation of the first Parliament of the country, for which a brand-new Parliament House is being built in one of the more open quarters of the great city. Meantime, a prominent reformer, and one of the authors of the New Constitution, the Count Okuma, Minister for Foreign Affairs, is slowly recovering from amputation of his leg, shattered by the bomb of a Japanese assassin, who, after flinging the cruel missile, cut his own throat on the spot, and died A JAPANESE CITY. 205 before he could be questioned. Politically, there- fore, things are not too quiet in the imperial capital; and perhaps it is partly on that account that the garden party in the Palace gardens, to which we had the honour of an invitation, was this week de- ferred. But it is to come off, people of the Court say, next week, and, meantime, we shall make a brief run to Nikko, to see the famous temples and mountains of the north, returning to Tokio for the imperial festivity and other metropolitan spectacles. BRITISH LEGATION, TOKIO, Nov. n, 1889. CHAPTER XIV. RURAL JAPAN. THE Emperor being still indisposed, and the garden party at the Palace, by consequence, deferred, we took advantage of the interval to visit Nikko, some ninety miles, or forty ri, north of Tokio. A railway runs sixty or seventy miles of this distance, to a place called Utsunomiya the remaining ri must be traversed by jinrikisha. It is necessary to be pro- vided with a passport for journeys beyond the treaty limits which are very circumscribed and the first policeman encountered at the railway station did not fail to demand and to inspect the imposing document wherewith we stood furnished. It forbade us I trust it may be added needlessly to " deface the temples ; to ride on horseback to a conflagration ; to trap, snare, or hunt wild animals without license ; or to resist the authorities with violence in the discharge of their duty." The officer at the station found the perpendicular Japanese characters on the document which we presented quite satisfactory, and bowed to the earth in token of it. On entering our railway carriage we perceived a go-zen, or tea- tray, thoughtfully provided by the company. There stood the boiling water, in a chased bronzed kettle, 206 RURAL JAPAN. 207 the tiny dainty pot with green tea leaves ready for infusion, and the small cups in their stand, so that, free of charge, we might sip o-cha as we started. The line passes through low-lying fields with har- vests of rice, tobacco, cotton, and the huge radish, dai-kon, fringed with waving thickets of bamboo, and populous with villages of little huts all built upon the same pattern, with fronts of framework and paper, and roofs of fine shingle or thatch. Here and there, near a temple, would be seen a " garden of the dead" stone monuments of quaint form inscribed with Japanese letters, and interspersed with clumps of the red camellia or tufts of chrysan- themum. Everywhere, indeed, is seen the Ki-ku imperial blossom of Japan growing at the cottage door, by the well, in the temple yard, beside the graves, and even in the paths intersecting the rice- fields. Everywhere, too, are visible the delightful Japanese babies most placid and most plump of all known infanthood rocking and blinking in the fold of the mother's kimono, but just as frequently tied on the backs of old men, boys, and little maidens ; for as soon as a Japanese child can even toddle about, a smaller one, who cannot yet run alone, is swaddled tightly upon its shoulders. The babies thus see everything, share everything, take part in agriculture, kite-flying, shopping, cooking, gossiping, washing, and all that goes forward and around, which perhaps gives them their extraordinary gravity and worldly wisdom, mingled with gladness, as soon as they reach the mature age of four or five. They 208 SEAS AND LANDS. then bow, and say ohayho ! and carry up and down another baby, and shuffle about on clogs, as if life were already understood by them quite as thoroughly as by their mothers, whose wooden pattens make the stations echo so blithely as they enter or quit the train. Round almost every country hut the yellow fruit of the ka-ki, or persimmon, is hanging up to dry for winter use, and the fruit itself may be seen on the leafless tree, like a smooth, elongated orange. On the left of the line, all the way from Tokio to Utsunomiya, the beautiful head of Fuji-San per- petually shows itself, at first dim, misty, and vaguely gilded in the too full light of the afternoon ; then majestically displaying its crown of snow high above a belt of sunset clouds ; and lastly, as the evening falls, and the background of the west deepens from rose red and amber to grey and emerald green emerging in full outline, almost from base to summit, a cone, mathematically perfect, of indigo blue, dominating the whole landscape by its grace and grandeur, although it is twenty leagues, as the stork flies, to the foot of that stupendous mountain. We arrive in the dark at Utsunomiya, hand our tickets to collectors, who bow down to the platform, and our light baggage and ourselves to jinrikisha men, who trundle away up an interminable street, glittering with paper lanterns and the lamps of a thousand little open shop-fronts. Just as we wonder whether there will ever be any "other end" to Utsunomiya, the Kurumas are wheeled sharply RURAL JAPAN. 209 round and brought up with a general shout of arrival in front of a Japanese inn. The peculiarity of such an establishment, on a first experience, is that you see all of it at once, like a doll's house of which the facade has been flung open. There is the little passage full of waraji and clogs, by which you enter between raised platforms covered with mats so spotless that you would not, as you must not, tread upon them except with unshod feet. There is the shining ladder of dark polished wood without hand-rails, by which you pass to the little rooms upstairs, all visible at a glance with their sliding doors and papered lattices. There is the kitchen, with charcoal fire burning under the rice-cauldron, and beside it a little paved way to the bath-room and minor offices. The entire per- sonnel of the inn upon your first approach in- cluding mistress, proprietor, and four or five female "helps," with glossy hair, and short, white, cloven stockings prostrates itself on the edge of the matting, with hands spread, foreheads touching the black lacquer border, and soft little choruses of " hayo gozarimas," and " ide nasai ; " that is to say, " Your honourable arrival is most wel- come ! " " Please to make your honourable en- trance ! " Shoes are slipped off and indoor slippers offered, into which thrusting your feet, you slide and glide with many a bow and "Arigato" ("Thank you ") over the immaculate mats and up the shining ladder to the blamelessly clean pigeon-loft assigned for your use. Squares of padded cloth are placed o 2io SEAS AND LANDS. on the floor, and the hibachi, or " fire-box," is brought in and set in the midst, with two brass knitting needles whereby to stir and trim the glowing charcoal. The musume, a young waiting girl, next presents, always on her knees, tiny cups of pale yellow tea, unsweetened and unmilked, and, learning that you will partake of dinner, beats the matting with her little brow, and goes to command it. Various members of the household drop in meanwhile to salute and inspect the visitors, and presently th'e repast arrives. First appears a small square table about eight inches high, upon which are placed fresh cups and chopsticks (hashi), the latter being cut from white wood, the two sticks still joined at the end, so that you may know they are fresh and unused. You separate them as a hungry man takes up his knife and fork, and are then ready for the " honourable tray" of red or black lacquer, which is slid within your reach by the kneeling and bowing musume. On each of our trays was a little bowl of soup with shreds of vegetables, a saucer of pickled celery and radish tsukemono a minute slab of boiled trout, another saucer holding shreds of cold chicken, and a wooden bowl with a rather doubtful composition of some sort of whey and white of egg. Between the trays a large wooden tub of hot boiled rice, admir- ably dressed, was set, with a fresh pot of tea. A plate of cakes kashi also appeared, and when we had asked for and obtained salt and bread articles apparently not usually furnished there was quite RURAL JAPAN. 211 enough to eat, and of no bad quality. The little glossy-haired musume kneels all the time before the guest, softly murmuring as she re-fills your plate or cup, "Mo sukoshi nasai " " Condescend to take a little more!" and it is part of the re- fined politeness of this nation that they call hot water, tea, and soup, by complimentary terms, as "0 yu" "The honourable hot-water;" "0 cha," "The honourable tea;" " tsuyu" "The honour- able refreshing dew of soup." The hot white rice, decorously poked into the mouth with the chop- sticks from the edge of- the lacquered basin, is the real mainstay of the meal, which, being removed, the tobacco-box and small bamboo pipes succeed. By-and-by beds are prepared by drawing from a hidden cupboard many quilted mats and a little bolster about the size of a Bologna sausage, stuffed with rice-blades. An andon, or paper lamp, is then put in a corner of the room, the charcoal brazier is replenished, and the household, generally, again touch the soft clean mats with their foreheads, murmuring " yasumi nasai " (" Condescend to take honourable repose "). The sliding shoji are pushed back, you creep between the padded quilts on the floor, and before sinking to slumber observe in the dim light the simplicity of your apartment. It contains one Kakemono, or " hanging picture," in Indian ink, one pot of chrysanthemums, an in- scribed tablet in Japanese bearing the name of a god, or a river, or mountain, and a tiny looking- glass on a dressing-table about as large as a cigar- 212 SEAS AND LANDS. box. Now you will hear the shrill notes from the street below of the pipe blown by the ammo,, the shampooer ; the light, musical laughter of the musumes downstairs, washing up ; the tinkling strings of the samisen played in one little room, the monotones of a Buddhist reading his sacred books in another, the barking of the village dogs, the rattle of a late jinrikisha, the splash of some tardy traveller boiling himself by way of refresh- ment in the very hot furo-dd of the basement, the noise of numerous paper shutters closing in your own and adjoining abodes, and the stroke of the watchman's staff as he makes his rounds. Lulled more or less by these sounds, and with a strange, indescribable odour about you of clean matting, soy, and salted jasmine, you sink to sleep, to dream, perhaps, amid the transparent walls of the chamber, that you are a new hat in a bandbox, or an ivory carving wrapped up in tissue paper. After a breakfast more substantial than the airy appetites of the Japanese would demand, we depart, amid a shower of sayonaras and gentle good wishes for a prosperous journey, to Nikko. The distance by road is twenty-five miles, which we are to accomplish in four jinrikishas, one of these ever-amusing vehicles containing our guide and another our baggage. We have two men to each jinrikisha, one in the shafts, the other pushing behind or pulling with a cord ; and, small though they be, and hilly albeit the road, they will run the twenty-five miles quite easily in four hours. The journey gives a good insight into RURAL JAPAN. 215 Japanese rural life, since the way passes through many villages, and a fairly populous country. The road for four-fifths of its length is bordered on either side by stately trees, principally cryptomeria, some of which attain an extraordinary size, and for leagues together furnish an avenue of the utmost beauty and magnificence. Hundreds among these trees have more than five feet diameter at a man's height, and lift their dark green crowns more than a hundred feet high. Every now and then a spot is reached where lightning, or the tail of a typhoon, has brought down one of these forest giants, hollowed to the core, and it either lies from bank to bank like a massive bridge, or has been partly consumed by fire and sawn in fragments, so that the thoroughfare can be cleared. In and about the villages a primitive but very practical agriculture is being earned on. The men are reaping rice, knee-deep in its wet bed ; the women, old and young, are threshing out the rice- bundles with curious revolving flails, or beating bunches of millet and other grains on the top of a web, which lets the seed fall through, and thus combines threshing and winnowing. Lightly built carts, drawn by ponies, led by a nose-string, convey rice straw, shingles, petroleum for the household lamps, and vegetables ; but much of the traffic is done with pack animals. Everywhere may be seen the bright, placid life, the easy manners, the quiet contentment with the day, its duties and its pleasures, the light yet sincere piety, the kindness to children, strangers, and animals, the friendliness and tem- 2i6 SEAS AND LANDS. perance, and the indifference to the future, which mark a Buddhistic people. At Matsumoto, and again at Imaichi, our two- legged steeds pull up briskly at a roadside tea- house, where we are received with the sweet invariable politeness of this people, and sip little cups of pale tea, and munch parti-coloured biscuits under the shade of waving bamboos, or in a garden of the usual fantastic design. The Japanese love of flowers is as genuine as it is refined. At Imaichi a small boy brings us out a pot of chrys- anthemums and places it beside us, as if it were in the nature of things that our rest would be made better and happier by the purple and amber blossoms. The little ones in the streets shout out " Ohayo ! " in cheerful salutation, and the older people bow gracefully. As for our human horses, they seem insensible to fatigue, and trot the last five miles into Nikko as freshly as at first. Starting so early in the morning from Utsunomlya, we have arrived in time for lunch at the hotel, and for a good walk into the heart of the mountains as far as Nanataki, the " Seven Cascades." All around the little town, which deals principally in skins of wild animals and articles turned from wood, are lofty hills clothed in thick timber and full of lakes and cataracts, and the air is pure and invigorating, Nikko being 2000 feet above sea-level. But what brings native and foreign people to Nikko is not the grand mountain scenery surround- ing it, nor its superb avenues of firs, nor any RURAL JAPAN. 217 attraction the little town can offer, but the splendid temples and the royal tombs, which make it a place of pilgrimage and one of the spots dearest to Japanese piety and patriotism. The people have a proverb, " He who has not seen Nikko knows not the meaning of the word Kikko " (beautiful). You find in Japan everywhere apparently two religions, Shinto and Buddhism, but the two intermix almost universally as much in belief as in locality. I gather that every Japanese baby is placed at its birth under the care of some Shinto deity, but lives and dies in some Buddhist sect. Shinto is the religion, so far as it is one at all, of the Court and the State, but it exacts few or no observances, and the moral guidance of the nation is practically com- mitted so far as I can ascertain to imperfect forms of Buddhism. Shinto, meaning " Wav of the w Gods," to distinguish it from Butsu-do, the " Way of Buddha," was, it seems, ancestor-worship first, and afterwards nature -worship. And this has affected Japanese Buddhism, for in most Japanese houses, together with the Shinto shrine, there is a Buddhist picture, and tablets inscribed to the memory of dead members of the family, who are prayed to and have the advantage of periodical offerings and burnt per- fume sticks. There are Shinto priests who wear a peculiar gown while officiating in the temple, and a black cap with a white fillet, and you may generally know a Shinto temple by the bundle of white paper or calico hanging in front of its shrine, which has, perhaps, a metal mirror over above it. Inside the 2i8 SEAS AND LANDS. sanctum an emblem of divinity is preserved, wrapped in a box, which may be a sword, a stone, or a shoe, but which even the chief priest scarcely ever sees. The worshipper claps his hands before this, bows his head, and throws a coin or two on the altar-mat, but utters no audible prayer. Pure Shintoism does not admit of any external decoration or images. The wood of the temple, which imitates the ancient Japanese hut, should be unpainted, and the roof merely thatched. But the advent of Buddhism, which came in from Corea and China about 600 A.D., brought with it religious and secular art, which Shintoism partly adopted ; and this caused the Shoguns, or secular rulers, to oscillate between one cult and the other, so that at Nikko as well as in Shiba, the Royal Mausoleum of Tokio one finds Buddhist and Shinto fanes within the same en- closure, and the latter as brilliantly adorned at any rate, inside as the splendid Buddhist sanctuaries near at hand. There are nine times as many Buddhist temples in Tokio as Shinto, and Mr. Satow, C.M.G., a very high authority, writes that " Buddhism, during the last ten years, has been steadily regaining power and position ; while the Shinto religion, for the protection of which a Government Department, ranking with the Council of State, was thought necessary at the revolution, has relapsed into its former insignificance. It is still in a certain sense a national religion, since its temples are maintained out of the imperial and local revenues, and the attendance of the principal RURAL JAPAN. 221 officials is required by Court etiquette at certain annual festivals celebrated at the Palace. But it has no exclusive hold over any section of the people, who adhere to it just in the same degree, and no more, as has been their practice during the last thousand years." Shiba meaning " the grass-lawn "-in the capital, is a wonderful group of mortuary chapels and temples gathered round the tombs of six of the Shoguns, with those of their wives and fathers. It is a maze of strange Chinese-looking edifices, burning in the noonday light with gold, bright- coloured carvings, fantastic arabesques, sculptured eaves, painted red, and sweeping black roofs ; each temple planted in a court, surrounded by stone railings, and a great number of votive lanterns, carved out of stone, together with objects in bronze, ornamental belfries, sacred wells, and picturesque gateways. All these are environed by dense groves of tall, dark fir trees, and on almost every portion of them is to be seen the triple Asarum leaf, the crest of the great Toku-gawa family of Shoguns, who were Buddhists. But, since nearly all the features of Shiba are reproduced with greater splen- dour at Nikko both being practically indescribable without pictures a brief mention of the wonderful shrines of the latter must do duty for both. A range of imposing mountains rises round Nikko, called the " Hills of the Sun's Brightness," and in a hollow of one of its lower glens stand the picturesque and curious structures which make the 222 SEAS AND LANDS. little town famous. They have grown up chiefly to mark the resting-places of a Buddhist saint named Sh6d6 Sh6nin and of two famous royal Shoguns, lye Yasu and lye Mitsu. At the top of the single street of Nikko you turn, by an ancient bridge painted red, and pass through a grove of cryptomerias to the gate of the Sambutsu- do, or " Hall of Three Buddhas." You will enter that presently, and see within it the colossal figures, heavily gilded, and the familiar decorations of a sumptuous Buddhist shrine ; but you must first go on to a tall granite torii or gateway, where, hard by a five-storied pagoda, painted in red and green, a Shinto priest gives you the paper of admission, which he stamps with a vermilion seal. Armed with this, you enter the " porch of the two kings," and find yourself in a region of barbaric grandeur, where edifice after edifice grotesquely glorified, and tomb after tomb superbly but sombrely adorned, at first fascinate and then bewilder the attention. It is a region of fantastic architecture, gigantic gateways glowing with carved work, sometimes ex- quisitely beautiful or sometimes singularly hideous ; of paved courts, rich with wonderful bronzes, and ranges of sculptured votive lanterns ; of wide stair- ways of masonry leading to black-lacquered plat- forms, on which magnificent shrines stand with golden walls and pillars, and roof trees and eaves, blazing with red and green and blue, are cut into wonderful volutes and gargoyles. Gilding and carving, lacquer and enamels, the richest chasing RURAL JAPAN. 223 and the rarest sculpture, with blocks of stone massive enough for the Titans, and joinery deli- cate as fairy work, unite in these extraordinary fanes. If you studied every detail of wonder, it is not a day but a month which would be necessary, and they would look yet more imposingly splendid but for a casing of plain wood which covers their side- walls. In one court rises a great tree a hundred feet high, which lye-Yasu was wont to carry about in his palanquin in a flower-vase. A holy cistern next presents itself, where the water runs over the granite so equally that it seems a solid block of the element ; a bronze lamp from the King of Loo-choo also claims attention, and a bell from the King of Corea. Another stone staircase is ascended, and you are amongst tigers, tapirs, twisted dragons, and gilded demons, so lifelike as almost to alarm. And then gate succeeds to gate, court to court, cloister to cloister, and stairway to stairway, in such lavish confusion that it is a welcome repose to abstract the mind from the bewildering and heathenish grandeur by slipping off the shoes and entering one of the temples. The folding doors are rich with lotus and peony in gold relief. Beyond the black threshold stretch soft white mattings, leading through an ante-chamber, under a ceiling diapered with wonderful colour and carving, to an altar glittering with gold and shining red-and-black lacquer. The panels of what might be called the nave, as well as the chancel to which it brings us, 22 4 SEAS AND LANDS. are embellished with marvellous figures in sculp- tured wood and beaten gold ; and gold asarum leaves, the crest of the great family whose founders rest here, repeat themselves in every spot. In the oratory, if it be Shinto, there hang Gohei, or charms in gold paper, with a circular mirror of metal, and you see the rural pilgrims prostrate themselves here, wrap a coin or two in white paper, reverently deposit the gift, and rise and depart with- out a word. If it is Buddhist, the decorations will be still more dazzling, and the treasures of the oratory more numerous and elaborate, while scrolls of " the Law " will be laid for reading on low stools. Both and all these buildings are chapels to the tombs of the saint and of the great Shoguns. Weary of the overwhelming but often rude and grotesque splendour, you quit the soft-matted, silent, shining temple and the motionless priests, and pass up moss-grown ancient stone stairways and along galleries of masonry to the bell-shaped tombs, surrounded by balustrades of stone, where the old secular Kings of Japan sleep. In front of them stand great storks in bronze, and huge incense burners in the same material. All round the tombs, enclosing the entire range of buildings, groves of enormous trees cast their black-green shadow. The mountain glen seems to embrace the shrines and tombs alike, and to shut them from the glare of day, with gaunt rocks and impenetrable foliage. There is one spot near the gate of the mausoleum of lye-Mitsu where you pass between the God of RURAL JAPAN. 225 Wind, painted green and gold, and the God of Thunder, all blazing crimson, and reaching the " Yaksha Gate," look out of it upon the wall of dark-green verdure and the wilderness of curving roofs, gilded ridge-poles, brilliant doorways, and lacquer alight with gold. Here the weird and strange attractions of the scene seem to be concen- trated in all that nature can lend of solemnity to all that superstition can devise of blended terror and beauty. For there is nothing elevating, reposeful, or edifying here. The Shinto has taken up with splendid but painful images of ugliness and awe, the Buddhism is degenerate and decorative, and the mountains around, which have elsewhere so many features of gracious beauty, huddle their crags together round the place, and lend it nothing but what it seems to ask profound shadow, sepulchral gloom, and an unbroken silence. Half dazzled, half oppressed with pacing through a dozen glittering shrines and chapels, resplendent hondens and haidens, superb oratories and gloomy tomb-enclosures, where gorgeous details overlaid and overwhelmed each other, and the mind became obscured as is the eye when it gazes too long upon extreme brilliancy, we resumed our shoes, and, passing towards the beautiful gate, Yomei Mon, saw the one graceful and charming sight of the fantastic labyrinth. Close by a side building where country people upon their knees were buying written charms to take home for good luck or recovery from illness, we came upon a pretty little open chapel 226 SEAS AND LANDS. marked by the Shinto gold paper shreds and mirror. On its floor of spotless matting was a seated figure, which might have been taken at first for the chief triumph of the Shogun carvers' work, so motionless was it ; but in another moment you perceived this was only a Japanese girl clothed in white, and seated in the shrine. Our guide threw a coin into the box in front of her. Upon this she rose, and, with extremely becoming movements, commenced the kagura, or temple dance, beating slow time to her own steps with the bunch of silver bells held in her right hand, and waving her fan to the same cadence with her left, while performing what was a most rhythmical, solemn, and striking "pas seul." Her white head-dress, almost Abyssinian in style, her large white sleeves and scarlet " obi," made her very pictorial, and she was, besides this, so entirely comely, gentle, and demure, that when she bowed her head, closed her fan, and sank back again into dreamy silence, I asked my interpreter what gift he had made for so delightful a little ceremony, and what would be its efficacy theologically. He answered that the dance was supposed to "drive away devils " for those who paid ; and that his offer- ing, on our behalf, had been four sen, a sum equal to about twopence. Shocked at this unworthy tribute for certainly any demons of taste would have been attracted rather than repelled by so much grace and gentleness I offered the taciturn danseuse a more adequate present on my own account, where- upon she rose again silently and demurely as before, RURAL JAPAN. 22? and repeated the strange undulating movements, the deftly-measured steps, the fan-waving, and bell- ringing of the mystic dance. Her dark eyes, fair, quiet face, and pious gravity were perhaps the best and nicest things we saw in the renowned temple grounds at Nikko ; and I, at least, shall remember the slow, musical beat of her silver bells, and the perfect harmony between her little feet and her fluttering fan longer than the gold and red and green devils whom it was her befitting duty to exorcise. Even had those devils been " blue," O Take San "the Hon. Miss Bamboo" might have danced them all away with her debonnair simplicity and youthful grace. NIKKO, Nov. 18, 1889. CHAPTER XV. TEMPLES AND SHRINES. FuJi-SAN is hidden this morning in driving clouds, which deluge the roofs of Tokio with rain ; and the garden party in the Palace grounds, fixed for this afternoon, cannot, I fear, come off. Our tickets of admission to the imperial presence, splendidly emblazoned with the royal chrysanthemum, and printed in golden Japanese characters, have just been delivered ; but the wind is raging like a com- mencing typhoon, and the Japanese abroad are, for the most part, wrapped in straw coats, niino, and pent-house hats, which give them the appear- ance of small hayricks moving about. Everybody exclaims, VAme! taksan warui/" ("Rain, very bad ! "), and I shall endeavour to utilise our forced leisure by describing two or three excursions made in the picturesque country round about Nikko. Returning from that long journey into the interior, and from wandering about the hills and valleys of the Nikko-zan, the strongest impression left is of the invariable gentleness and courtesy of this people. With the restless curiosity of our kind, we have gone into temples, cemeteries, shrines, tea-houses, native hotels, private residences, farmyards, rice- 228 TEMPLES AND SHRINES. 231 mills, and bathing-places encountering nowhere the smallest deviation from the soft and pleasant manners already noted. It would be absurd to think that the foreign element can be particularly welcome in a land so intensely patriotic and pecu- liar, where the best-informed stranger constantly violates the proprieties of Japanese speech and customs, and where the most considerate must be often rather a nuisance than otherwise. But whether it be due to the humanising influence of Buddhism, or to the happy mixture in Japanese veins of the good-humoured Mongolian blood with the subtle and graceful Malay nature on all sides and in all places the well-conducted traveller in Japan meets with the same douceur inalterable of behaviour. As you pass through the villages lining the high road, the little ones, waddling about on wooden pattens, with their smaller brothers and sisters strapped upon their backs, wag their shaven heads and bend low shaking the baby altogether out of position uttering cheerful and friendly Ohayos ! The very baby, if he can say anything at all, blinks with his tiny almond eyes, and nods his small poll, and babbles " Hayo ! hayo!" to the passing wayfarer. At the tea-houses, when all is paid, and there is nothing more to expect, the girls will offer the departing guest a bunch of chrysanthemums, or a red or white camellia, and to whatever expressions of thanks you employ the pretty answer is, " What have I done?" ("Do itashimashita f ") If you ask 232 SEAS AND LANDS. the way, your guide for the time being will almost rather let you take the wrong turning in a forest path than walk before you. You are led into awful mistakes and mutual misapprehensions by the Japanese habit of never contradicting. They answer "Yes" to almost everything, and the musu- mes in particular softly murmur " Hi ! Hi ! Hi ! " all the time you are giving orders or asking questions. If they have anything to say longer than a word or two off goes the hat, and the hands are laid on the bended knees by the men, while the women slide down upon their heels, and smooth their kimono over their laps, and so con- tinue the "august communication." Faces plain and sad and toil-worn you may meet, and faces inquisitive, indifferent, or unintelligent. But these are rare even amongst the males, while among the females the young have almost always bright and kindly looks, and the old a sweet serenity of expression, as if they were sure, as they are, of respect and affection. Of course, I am merely an ignorant newcomer here, and all this may be as some say the lacquer laid over insincere natures. Yet it presents no such aspect to my eyes ; and if the merry friendliness and delightful ways of the knot of children and mothers who gathered around us at Utsunomiya yesterday to laugh at our broken Japanese, and to divide some sugar and cakes, was not sincere, it was the prettiest imitation of sincerity. The light per- petual laughter of the Japanese especially charms. TEMPLES AND SHRINES. 233 With the women and children it is the softest, most musical " chortle " that could be heard ; and even the jinrikisha men chuckle perpetually as they dash you along the narrow roads, and seem full of joyous badinage one with the other or with the passers-by. Dazzled with the barbaric splendour of the Nikko Temples, Tosho-Gu, Diu-yu-in, Sambutsu-d6, Futa- ara, and the rest, we found it pleasant to wander off into some of the mountain glens which surround the town and the famous shrines. One such excursion on foot was to Shichi-taki ("The Seven Cascades"). The path led through a village, where daikon (great white radishes) were drying in the sun. Water- wheels were working the rice-pestles ; women were washing household utensils in the mountain-brooks ; and pack-horses with straw shoes were bringing wood from the hills to a sort of moor covered with long dry feathery grass and thickets of occasion- ally unfamiliar aspect. The northern and southern floras meet in this favoured land. Oaks, laurels, and conifers keep the fair empire green throughout the dry and flowerless winter ; elms, beech, walnut, chestnut, and birch mingle with the ever-graceful bamboo, dwarf palms, and cycads. Wild plum and cherry trees make the country a perfect Japanese kakemono in spring ; and these well-known trees have for neighbours hydrangeas, camellias, azaleas, magnolias, the camphor laurel, and the tea bush. Even a careless botanist might find, in lowlands or highlands near the Treaty ports, such old friends 234 SEAS AND LANDS. as shepherd's purse, dandelion, monkshood, poppy, celandine, violet, mallow, chickweed, plantago, mistletoe, golden rod, burweed, burdock, thistle, red convolvulus, dock, and herb Robert ; while if he knew a little of sub-tropical vegetation he would also recognise the glossy saw-edged tea-leaf, the lotus (hasu), the loquat, yam, cotton, vegetable wax, and varnish plant, tobacco, rice, sesamum, &c. From the coppices and dried-up grasses, as we pass, spring many pheasants ; a lighter-coloured and smaller bird than that familiar at home, but very pretty as its purple and green plumage glitters in the sunlight. We see the brimstone, the white admiral, and tortoiseshell butterflies, and others which are new ; and crows, tits, shrikes, wagtails, owls, jays, with a few finches brighter in colour than our own. The prettiest of Japanese small birds is a fly-catcher, coloured azure blue and emerald green, but in autumn it loses the long tail feathers. Wild geese fly overhead in a long wedge, and there are egrets in a swamp, with snipe, and what looks like an ibis, with pink legs and white feathers. The woodcock sometimes showing cream-coloured plumage is common in the hollows where streams run. Along our path, from time to time, rises a little Shinto shrine, distinguishable by its unpainted torii or " bird-perch," which makes the gate, and by the strips of zig-zag paper and rag suspended before the inner recess. More frequently it is a Buddhist "templette," with a whole posse of Buddhas in stone grouped around some with head on hand, TEMPLES AND SHRINES. 235 reposing in the calm of Nirvana, some erect with hand raised in benediction, some seated with closed eyes, placid countenance, and folded knees. Near these is often a little cemetery, full of wooden and stone tablets bearing the name of the deceased, and in front of each a flower-vase of pottery, or a little vessel containing sand in which to put lighted perfume sticks. One such tablet recorded so our interpreter declared the living, and the after-life, the name and too early demise of O-tzubaki-San, " Miss Camellia." It did seem such a sad pity that she could no more enjoy the clear morning air and soft mountain outlines, and the berries and flowers of the road to the waterfall, that we kindled a half- dozen of scent sticks and set them up, burning, in her little votive saucer, nay, and we even said, heathenishly, a "Sayonara," as we hastened away over the Japanese moorland. Upon its face we meet many woodcutters return- ing with laden ponies, their fore-feet shod with grass-slippers tied on with cord. We pass a vast boulder, hollowed at the top by nature or art, where the rain has collected, and the wayfaring country folk pause here to wash their hands before offering a prayer to the adjacent shrine, calling it Ame-furo- ishi, the " Kain Bathstone." At a small and solitary tea-house, near the waterfall, we find an old lady of seventy-eight summers, all alone in this wilderness, whose four children are gone down to Nikko. She bustles about, after the usual salutations, and pre- pares tea, as well as pouring out a tiny cup of sake, 236 SEAS AND LANDS. the rice-spirit, which one soon learns to appreciate. Always, with the tea, are provided little green and red biscuits, and, if you are seriously hungry, the tub of hot boiled rice. All around this mountain tea-house are ranged ancient figures of Buddha, upon which votaries have affixed scraps of paper bearing their names, and sometimes a statement of their wishes. Yet the old lady is no Buddhist, but of the Shinto persuasion, so closely do the two creeds dwell together. Her cottage, of framework and paper, is full of the strangest mixture of religious tablets, household utensils, and fruits and herbs hung up to dry ; and when we ask for more fuel to replenish the hibachi she proudly explains that she has the right to cut wood all over the hillside. The cups in which she serves the tea and sake are of the most delicate porcelain and of lovely form and colour, and there are many things valuable, to Japanese minds, in her lonely dwelling. There are surely not many countries where an old lady like this could live alone at such a distance from habita- tions in perfect security. The " Seven Cascades," just beyond her tea-house, is a picturesque cataract which in England would render a district renowned here it principally serves to supply the stream where our hostess washes her tubs and pipkins. Another charming waik of eight or ten miles took us to Urami, a still finer waterfall, the name sig- nifying " See behind," because you can pass under the descending water, which shoots in a great column far out from the lofty rock. Arashi-yama, TEMPLES AND SHRINES. 237 " Mountain of Typhoons," soared near at hand, and sent down the stream supplying the beautiful cascade. All along the moorland path, as, indeed, in every road of Japan, the way was marked by the cast-off waraji, the woven grass shoes, which the people buy for a penny a pair, and fling aside after a few days', or even hours', rough wear. Every wayside shop supplies them by scores, as well as the thicker and heavier articles made for horses ; and when the shopkeeper has nothing better to do, he weaves waraji. Uncramped by boots or shoes, the Japanese foot is always shapely and free of blemish ; but the cord of the grass shoe and of the clog which passes between the great toe and the other toes spreads them, and causes a callosity in the interval. Japanese foot-gear cannot, of course, be worn with an European stocking. Yet another little excursion conducted us on foot along the course of the Daiya-Gawa River which runs under the red bridge of Utsunomiya to a deep pool called Kamman-ga-fuchi, the "Whirlpool of the Tortoise." On the road we passed a long line of carts, having a red flag inscribed with Japanese characters fixed upon the load of each. Our inter- preter deciphered the letters as meaning " Exercise honourable precaution," and looking more closely we observed that the boxes were marked " Dynamit." The perilous commodity was passing to the copper- mines under the hill Nan-tai-zan, to be used in blasting the rock ; and there was enough to produce, if exploded, something far worse than the slight 238 SEAS AND LANDS. earthquake felt the night before. We were glad to get the river between ourselves and this uncom- fortable convoy, upon which the Japanese carters were gaily riding, and smoking their little brass pipes. Between a small temple and the Tortoise Rock a long line of images of Amida the Amitaya, or " Measureless One " of Indian Buddhism was ranged. We counted 126; there may have been more. Some were new, some very old all bore in their sculptured features the same traditional placidity of expression, the same carefully preserved benignity of air, which the rudest artists of this cult have known how to perpetuate in representing the Buddha or his incarnations. Some charming verses, sent to me by a Californian lady named Annie Herbert Barker, of San Rafael, seem to express the spirit which was visible in the passionless coun- tenances of all these Buddhas with such felicity that it might almost be thought this gifted writer had herself viewed the rushing Japanese river, the "Mountain of the Typhoon," all the marks and memorials of earth's restless life, and amid them those records in ancient stone of the unalterable tranquillity, the unshaken content, the immeasurable aspirations of the Buddh. Her verses run " To hear in old words, breathing balm, The secret of the Wordless Calm, The equipoise of chastened will, The Master's comfort, ' Peace, be still ! ' To search tear-bordered lids between Until each wandering soul, serene, TEMPLES AND SHRINES. 239 Finds in Nirvana of the blest A mother's arms, a lover's breast. O TJuseen Presence ! Constant Power ! That comprehends our little hour : Because Thou art, though unconfessed, When Nature faints, we feel Thee Rest ! Thy Light, which is not Sun or Star, But clear as heavenly haloes are, Illumes the path our feet must tread, Thy pity folds us, quick and dead. So, cradled in immensity, Troubled or still my couch may be, What time in tranced dusk I wait The turning of the Key of Fate ! " The wayside avenue of Buddhas showed nearly every figure with prayers and wishes written on slips of paper and pasted on the breast, or little stones marked and laid in the lap of the " Unspeak- able." These are to save small children, in the other world, from the penance of piling up pebbles by the bank of the " Dark River." Buddhism is deeply ingrained albeit with corruptions in the minds and hearts of this people. They have the Goma (Sanskrit, " Homa "), and the Ingwa, or doc- trines of Karma and Transmigation ; the priest's scarf is Kesa (Sanskrit, " Kashaya ") ; and the Maye- dachi, the image on the altar, together with the altar itself, recalls with much precision Indian and Singhalese models. The Rim-bo, " Wheel of the Law " (Chakra in Sanskrit), is constantly carved and painted. As I write these words a deputation of Japanese Buddhist priests enters my room at 240 SEAS AND LANDS. the British Legation to invite me to lecture on the Holy Places of the Faith to the Tokio Brethren, and afterwards to dine with them more Japonico. They bring with them a translation into Japanese of " The Light of Asia," and are friendly, courteous and accomplished gentlemen. Last night, after the heavy rains and wild winds which rendered the Mikado's garden festival im- possible, another and far stronger shock of earth- quake shook this city. It occurred shortly before midnight, and continued for about forty seconds. Lying in bed, it was easy and interesting for me to note its phenomena first, the rattling of things movable inside and outside the chamber ; then a strange distant rumbling noise, like the passage of an underground train, increasing in volume until the strongest shock was felt, and afterwards dying away with tremors and shudders of the ground ; lastly, perfect stillness, except for the crowing of disturbed cocks and the howls of surprised Tokio dogs. It imparted a feeling of pleasure rather than apprehension to realise that the planet itself was also quick and active, full of secret developments and hidden evolutions, shaping herself for later destinies with these throes and soft mysterious upheavals. " What ! alive and so bold ? Earth ! " There are two islands near the capital which are held to be the very seismological focus of Japan, so that earthquakes are common at Tokio, and old TEMPLES AND SHRINES. 241 hands will repose indifferently between the sheets and watch the wall paper split upon the sides of their chambers. This, however, is when Fuji-San is shaken to her roots. Last night she did but heave her mighty flanks a little, and utter the sigh of a sleeping Mountain Goddess. In 1855 (on November 1 1 ) an earthquake here destroyed 100,000 lives and 14,000 dwelling-houses, it is said. Decidedly one would prefer these interesting phenomena on a smaller scale ! BRITISH LEGATION, TOKIO, Nov. 20, 1889. CHAPTER XVI. POETRY AND PLAYS. YESTERDAY came off the long-deferred gathering in the gardens of the Emperor's Palace at Asakusa, in Tokio, to view the royal chrysanthemums. But the occasion was shorn of part, at least, of the dignity which had been foreshadowed, since neither his Imperial Majesty nor the Empress appeared. In Japan one does not inquire into the reasons for Court vacillations of purpose one expects and accepts them ; and the beautiful pleasure-grounds surrounding the former residence of the Mikado were thronged with the fine fieur of the capital. The Palace built mainly in the native style, with sliding shoji and walls adorned with storks, wild ducks, and rain-birds has been recently abandoned for the new and handsome abode situated within the moat and ramparts of the " shiro." But the park. surrounding the Asakusa House in which the present Emperor passed much of his earlier years is very spacious and picturesque, with hills and dales, groves of great trees and, parterres of flowers, bridges, tea-kiosks, and retreats embellished with the dwarfed vegetation, and artificial miniature landscape work, the taste for which has been POETRY AND PLAYS. 243 borrowed by Japan from China. Amidst these royal pleasaunces it was agreeable enough to wander, meeting many of the most distinguished of Japanese ministerial and official people. But an imperial edict had issued to the effect that frock coats and tall silk hats must be worn, and the mode for the Court ladies is still largely European, so that the spectacle lost much of its native charm. Nothing is more becoming to the bright complexions, and graceful, petite figures of Japanese ladies than their own charming kimono and obi; nothing less suitable than the Parisian costumes which they do not know how to select or to put on. ^sthetically it was absolutely tragic to meet a Minister of State in chimney-pot head- gear, and his charming consort in an ill-fitting London robe, which they would both eagerly dis- card for the dress of their country at the moment of reaching home. The pretty grey, and pink, and purple kimono of the less fashionable belles attend- ing the display were so many silent rebukes to the deplorable innovation, which, happily, is not gain- ing, but losing ground, even in the vicinity of the Court. The chrysanthemums were various in colour and form, and very magnificent, as befitted those cultivated for the Emperor's own eye, in a land where the kiku is the national emblem. Little Japanese soldiers, in the German uniform which has been adopted for the Army, as the Navy has taken up with our own British man-of-war style kept the gates and grounds with much military 244 SEAS AND LANDS. suavity. Discipline can neither add to nor diminish the perfect politeness and self-possession of this race. As our carriage drove through the outer portal of the palace, its fore off-wheel caught the jinrikisha of an official, and threatened, for the moment, to flatten him, like one of his own kake- mono, against the lacquered gate. His counte- nance, however, did not betray the slightest alarm, although, if the horses had not been instantly con- trolled, the affair might have proved serious. To our exclamation, " We beg your honourable excuse," he replied with a bow, " What slight thing is this ! Condescend not to take honourable notice," Among the company moved about very imposingly the Corean Ambassador and his suite, to whom we had the distinction of being presented. His Excellency, a grave, enlightened-looking diplomat, wore the most amazing head-dress ever, perhaps, invented, resembling the upper two storeys of a pagoda, with a slab of green jade upon its summit, and broad cheek-strings of amber beads. His attendants, similarly, but less splendidly, arrayed, furnished with their grey gowns and Mongol features a singular group among many others. It was by way of Corea and Northern China that Buddhism and the Chinese characters came into those four greater islands, which, constituting the bulk of the Empire, take, with the fanciful Japanese artist, the form and name of " Land of the Dragon- Fly." The Loo-choo group, of course, has been lately annexed to the Mikado's dominions under the POETRY AND PLAYS. 245 title of " Iliu-kiu." Numberless are the legends and fairy stories which the people tell of those outlying southern archipelagoes, to which adventurous sam- pans and ill-equipped junks must ofttimes have been driven in the old days, never or hardly ever to return. How full, for instance, of ancient romance and Buddhistic impress is this story of Urashima ! It has been translated, like many other exquisite things, from Japanese folk-lore by Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain one of the most accom- plished of Anglo-Japanese scholars, and the author of a grammar which was my daily study on the Pacific Ocean, and was so admirably compiled as to prove more interesting than any romance. Says the little tale which I abridge Long ago there lived on the coast of Japan a young fisherman named Urashima. One day he went out in his boat to fish, and caught a big tortoise. Now, tortoises always live a thousand years. So Urashima thought to himself, " A fish would do for my dinner just as well as this tortoise, in fact, better. Why should I prevent it from enjoying itself for another 999 years 1 No, no, I won't be so cruel." And with these words he threw the tortoise back into the sea. Then Urishima went to sleep in his boat, and as he slept there came up from beneath the waves a beautiful girl, who entered the boat and said, " I am the daughter of the Sea-God, and I live with my father in the Dragon Palace beyond the waves. It was not a tortoise that you caught just now. It was myself. My father the Sea-God had sent me to see whether you were good or bad. You shall marry me, if you like, and we will live happily together for a thousand years in the Dragon Palace beyond the blue sea." So Urishima took one oar and the Sea-God's daughter the other, and they rowed, and they came to the Dragon Palace, where the Sea-God ruled as King over all the dragons, tortoises, and fishes. The walls of the palace were of coral, the trees had emeralds for leaves and rubies for berries, the fishes' scales were 246 SEAS AND LANDS. of silver and the dragons' tails of solid gold. And it all belonged to Urashima ; so they lived happily. But one morning Urashima said to his wife, " I am very happy here. Still I want to go home and see my father and mother and brothers and sisters." "I am very much afraid," said she. " However, if you will go, you must take this box, and be very careful not to open it. If you open it you will never be able to come back." Then, getting into his boat, he rowed off, and at last landed on the shore of his own country. But everything seemed to have changed so much in those short years. Two men chanced to pass along the beach, and Urashima said, " Can you tell me where Urashima's cottage is that used to stand here ? " " Urashima ? " said they ; " why, it was four hundred years ago that he was drowned out fishing. His parents, and his brothers, and theif great-grandchildren are all dead long ago. His cottage fell to pieces hundreds of years ago." Then Urashima knew that the Sea-God's Palace beyond the waves, with its coral walls and its ruby fruits and its dragons with tails of solid gold, must be Fairyland, and that one day there was as long as a year in this world. So in a great hurry to get back he disobeyed her orders not to open the box, and out of it came a white cloud which floated away over the sea. Suddenly, too, his hair grew as white as snow, his face wrinkled, his breath stopped short, and he fell down dead on the beach. Is it not clear that Urashima's adventure is the echo of some old sea-story, told by the island folk, of Japan boatmen blown off the coast to far-off Corea or Loo-choo, returning long afterwards in junk or proa, the Rip Van Winkles of a world which had forgotten them ? Just beyond Kana- gawa, near this city, is the spot where Urashima lies buried ; so it must be all true ! For three nights past we have sate heroically on our heels at Japanese theatres, witnessing the per- formances which so delight the Yokohama public. If you can put up with the " pins and needles " which come into the hapless lower limbs of the DANJIRO THE ACTOR.. POETRY AND PLAYS. 249 European after about an hour of this position upon matting, there is much to interest in such places. They are wholly unlike any temple of the drama at home. The first odd sight is an anteroom where everybody hangs up his or her clogs and waraji ; and just imagine six hundred pair of muddy pattens on pegs ! Next is a teapot room, where scores of teapots are suspended for the refreshment of the audience ; since, at every pause in the performance, attendants go about shouting yoroshii ka, and o cha ! ocha! which is "Give your orders," and "Who wishes for the honourable tea?" The pit is a sloping floor covered with matting, and the gallery is divided into little square pens with railing a foot high, all nicely matted ; and hither if an habitue you bring your cushion, your " tobacco-mono," your charcoal fire, your pipe, your baby when you have one and see at your ease alternately a comic piece and the successive acts of some tremendous mediaeval tragedy. Everybody goes about in the building as he likes especially the children, who lift up the curtain and survey the preparations for the next scene, scamper about the stage, and play all sorts of private games until the acting recommences, when they are as good as gold and quiet as mice. The performers come on from the " boot and shoe room," along a narrow side stage ; the female parts being taken by boys. The dresses are rich and the acting intelligent, though extravagant accompanied almost always by a wild instrumental, recitative of strings and drum. Changes of the mise-en-scene and the 250 SEAS AND LANDS. general business of the stage are accomplished by persons who flit on and off in black habiliments, which are supposed to render them totally invisible to the spectators. These are, like Japanese every- where, attentive, patient, easily pleased, and imagi- native to the highest degree. They are abundantly content to see a forest, where two small shrubs in pots are placed upon the boards ; and an impene- trable wall, where a split bamboo or a couple of stones have been deposited. The great character of most pieces is the samurai, the two-sworded swashbuckler, who comes prancing in with a terrific swagger and ends by drawing his glittering blades to engage in fiery combat, or to commit the hara-kiri. The correct mode of performing this latter rite is by a thrust as I have learned not a slash, and the weapon remains in the wound, until all final dis- positions have been comfortably effected. Every- body smokes everywhere in a Japanese theatre, no one hustles for his place, or wants more than his own heels to sit upon. A policeman in uniform occupies a private pen at the back, and by a lighted paper lantern, reads loftily and apart the day's shimbun while the entertainment proceeds. The scenery is either absent, or of the simplest character. The serious and lyrical pieces are given in the old pure style of Japan, unmixed with the Chinese words which enter so freely into modern and colloquial Japanese. This leads to some mention of Japanese poetry, which has, I have ascertained, some remarkable POETRY AND PLAYS. 251 peculiarities. Japan has borrowed from abroad her religion, laws, writings, her wonderful arts in em- broidery, lacquer, carving, and pottery. The only thing perfectly original is her classical poetry. No Chinese word, as has been remarked, occurs in the pure style of this, which possesses practically but one metre, namely, of alternate lines of five and seven syllables, with an extra line of seven syllables to mark the close. For the sake of the curious in these matters, here is an example, with translation, as close as I can make it, after erudite help " Utsusemishi Kami ni taheneba, Hanare-wite, Asa nageku Kimi ; Sakari-wite, Waga kofuru Kimi Tarn a naraba, Te ni maki-mochite ; Kinu naraba, Nugu toki mo naku. Waga kohimu Kimi zo kizo no yo Ime ni miyetsuru." This which is the form of all high and ancient Japanese verse was written upon the death of the Mikado Tenji by one of his ladies, and means, in much the same measure " Oh, unconsoled one ! Shut from converse with above, Dawn of the morning Finds my spirit comfortless ; Flight of the daytime Sees me sighing for my Prince. 252 SEAS AND LANDS. Wert thou a jewel On mine arm I had bound thee ; Silk obi wert thou Night and day, over my heart, Thee had I folded. Now, my lover ! my lost lord ! Only in a dream I see thee ! So musical is Japanese speech that this rudi- mentary rhythmical form satisfies the native ear to-day in a street ballad as it did the courtiers of the Mikado in the seventh century. There are also certain very curious adjuncts employed by the Japanese muse known as " pillow-words " and " pivots." To explain these would lead too far into a technical subject, but they are luminously expounded by Mr. B. H. Chamberlain in his " Classical Poetry of the Japanese." Simplicity, conservatism, and courtly polish are declared by this great authority to be the characteristic features of the poetry of the charming people. " Nowhere," says the author, "do we come across a low word or vulgar thought. Even the mention of low people and things seems prohibited. Japanese verse in one unchanging and natural melody dwells on the simple themes common to all mankind love, hopes, regrets, loyalty, old traditions, and the transitoriness of human life. As in Japanese scenery we miss the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Alps and the vast magnificence of the wide, watered plains of the American continent, but are delighted at each turn by the merry plashing of a mountain torrent, the quaintly painted eaves of some little temple pictur- POETRY AND PLAYS. 255 esquely perched on a hillside amid plantations of pines and cryptomerias, or by the view of fantastic islets covered with bamboos and azaleas, while we thread our way through the mazes of the Inland Sea, so do we seem, on turning over the pages of the Japanese poets, to be, as it were, transported to some less substantial world, where the deeper and wilder aspect of things are forgotten, and where prettiness and a sort of tender grace are allowed to reign supreme." Poetry having always been a favourite study in Japan, there exist numerous volumes of verses either written or collected by the old Court nobles. Of these the most ancient is the Manydshiu, or " Collection of a Myriad Leaves," which dates from the eighth century. But this work, notwithstanding its antiquity, is less familiar than the Hiakuninshiu, or " Collection of One Hundred," which includes some pieces written by Emperors themselves. This was followed by almost numberless minor volumes of the same kind. Verse- making attained to such favour that it was a usual custom for one of the nobles to invite together several of his friends noted for their scholarship to pass away the time in this occupation. The verses were in nearly all cases in the style known as uta explained above the pure Japanese ode, as opposed to the ski, or Chinese poetry, introduced in later years. Each uta is complete in itself, and expresses one idea. The Japanese do not possess any great epics or didactic poems, but their utas are often inscribed on long strips of variegated paper ; and it 256 SEAS AND LANDS. is even now a common practice, when offering a present, to send with it a verse thus composed for the occasion by the donor. Even down to recent times, when a man had determined to commit suicide, or was about to hazard his life in some dangerous enterprise, it was not uncommon for him to prepare and leave behind him a verse descriptive of his intention and of the motive urging him to the deed. Sanetomo, the third and last Shdgun of the Minamoto house, was so extravagantly fond of poetry that any criminal could escape punishment by offering him a well- written stanza. I must return to this interesting subject, which well deserves study, and now break off from it to mention a pleasant excursion made the day before yesterday to Kama-Kura and the lovely seashore by the island of Enoshima, at no great distance from Yokohama. Kama-Kura, which means " the place where the sickle was buried," was once the seat of Government of Eastern Japan ; but the slight houses of this country, built of paper and light pine, pass away like leaves of the forest, and Kama-Kura is to-day all maple-grove and rice ground, and temples, and cherry-trees. The Shinto and Buddhist shrines here are beautiful and in- teresting ; but the chief attraction of the neighbour- hood is a gigantic figure in bronze of the Buddha, which you approach by crossing the stream named Nameri-gawa. There is a little story told here of the Japanese nobleman, Awoto. " One evening as he was going to the Palace to take his turn in POETRY AND PLAYS. 257 keeping the night-watch, he let ten cash drop out of his tinder-case into the stream, and then bought fifty cash worth of torches to search for the lost coin. His friends having laughed at him for spend- ing so much in order to recover so little, he replied, with a frown, ' Sirs, you are foolish and ignorant of economics. You are little actuated by feelings of benevolence. Had I not sought for these ten cash they would have been for ever lost, sunk at the bottom of the Narneri-gawa. The fifty cash which I have expended on torches will remain in the hands of the tradesman. Whether he has them, or I, is no matter ; but not a single one of these sixty has been lost, which is a clear gain to the country.' " It is doubtful if this would pass muster with the authorities upon Economic Science. As you approach the village of Hase from the Hachiman temples, in sight of the blue, calm sea, dotted with fishing-boats, the colossal bronze figure of the Dai Butsu rises over the leafless plum and cherry trees. The " Unspeakable " sits grandly upon a vast expanded lotus blossom, 50 feet high from knee to top-knot, with eyes 4 feet long, face from ear to ear measuring 18 feet, and gigantic folded hands, of which the thumbs have a circum- ference each of 3 feet. The half-veiled eyeballs are of pure gold, and the silver boss upon the forehead, denoting the Buddha's wisdom, weighs 30 Ibs. avoir- dupois. A broad courtyard with paved way leads the votary up to the majestic and placid presence 258 SEAS AND LANDS. of the " Amitabha," in front of whose folded knees are placed the usual grated box for offerings, and images, in gilded bronze, of lotus and rose blossoms. The expression of ineffable calm upon the ancient effigy well befits the tranquil scene around, the sleeping ocean, the laughing, happy village groups, the quiet groves of bamboo and maple, and the vast expanse of fertile plain beyond the little hill, where in the distance soars Fuji- San. The Lady of Moun- tains to-day has laid aside her veil of clouds, but appears like a silver cloud which has taken the form of a sleeping snow-clad volcano. From all that can be seen of the lower portions to the summit slightly truncated of the superb eminence, every portion is dazzling white by reason of last night's snowfall. The exquisitely symmetrical cone, ascend- ing high above the upper cumuli, takes exactly their argentine lustre from the strong light of the after- noon, and makes the clouds seem solid by its delicate aerial outlines, which are, nevertheless, fixed and clear. Below us the immense bronze Buddha, seven centuries old, and representing a faith twenty-five centuries old, which teaches the imper- manency of the visible, the eternity of the invisible. Beyond us that silvery apparition of cloud and mountain, where if we did not know her by daily sight and admiration none could say which was Fuji-San " Lady of all Hills " and which the fleeting vapours of the Pacific main. It was as if the Japanese landscape taught, not sadly, but silently POETRY AND PLAYS. 259 " We are such stuff As dreams are made of ; and our little lives Are rounded with a sleep." We rested to drink meditative tea at the Chaya of the Hoshi-no-ido, or " Well of the Star," where the fisher-girls of Enoshima, spreading the tiny sea-minnows to dry in the sun, soon laughed and chatted away all dull philosophies. YOKOHAMA, Nov. 23, 1889. CHAPTER XVII. A JAPANESE DINNER. A BANQUET here, properly arranged, served, and located, furnishes, in my humble judgment, as graceful and delightful a meal as can be shared in o o all the world ; and casts into the shade the classic memories of the triclinia of ancient times, the too solid and lavish dishes of Turkey and Syria, the cloying sweetmeats of an Indian hurra Khdna, and even in many respects the festal triumphs of a Parisian or London cordon bleu. The act of eating is, in truth, somewhat gross, and of the animal ; albeit, decidedly necessary. Japanese taste and fancy have, however, known how to elevate this somewhat humiliating daily need from a pro- cess of mere nourishment into a fine art and a delicate divertissement, where every sense is in turn softly pleased and soothed, and food and drink fall in like pleasant interludes without ever assuming the chief importance of the occasion. None the less may you fare abundantly, luxuriously, and to repletion, if you will, from the Japanese menu; but the fare is all the more agreeable and digestible because you eat what you like, when you like, as you like, and in what order you like during three or four placid hours, converted into a dream 260 A JAPANESE DINNER. 263 of pleasure by accomplished dancing and singing, and by the most perfect and most charming service. It was our good fortune lately to be invited to a typical native dinner at the Japanese Club in this capital, of which I will offer a sketch in the very lightest outline. The club, situated in the heart of the city, is a building entirely of the indi- genous style as to design and decoration, frequented chiefly by the higher officials and noblemen of Tokio. Imagine, if you can, endless platforms of polished wood, stairway ladders of shining cedar and pine, apartment after apartment carpeted with spotless matting, and walled by the delicate joinery of the shoji everywhere a scrupulous neatness, an exquisite elegance, a dainty aesthetic reserve ; nothing too much anywhere of ornament. Except the faultless carpentry of the framework and the tender colour of the walls and panelled ceilings, you will see only a stork or two in silk embroidery here, a dream in sepia of Fuji-San there, a purple chrysanthemum plant yonder, in its pot of green and grey porcelain, and the snow-white floors, with their little square cushions. Our dinner was one of about twenty cushions, and we were received at the entrance by about as many musumes the servants of the establishment having their okusama at their head, who, upon our approach, prostrate themselves on the outer edge of the matted hall, uttering musical little murmurs of wel- come and honour. Our footgear is laid aside below the dark polished margin of the hall, and we step 264 SEAS AND LANDS. upon the soft yielding tatamis, and are each then led by the hand of some graceful, small, tripping musume to the broad ladder, up which we must ascend to the dining-room, enlarged for the occa- sion by the simple method of running back the shutters of papered framework. The guests com- prise European ladies as well as gentlemen, and all are in their stocking-feet, for the loveliest satin slipper ever worn could not venture to pass from the street pavement to these immaculate mats. While you chat with friends you turn suddenly to find one of the damsels in the flowered kimono, and the dazzling obi, kneeling at your feet with a cup of pale tea in her tiny hands. Each guest receives this preliminary attention, then the square cushions are ranged round three sides of the room, and we tuck our legs under us those, at least, who can manage it and sit on our heels, the guest of honour occupying the centre position at the top. To each convive then enters a pretty, bright, well-dressed Japanese waitress, with hair decked "to the nines," stuck full of flowers and jewelled pins, and shining like polished black marble. She never speaks or settles to any serious duty of the entertainment without falling on her little knees, smoothing her skirt over them, and knocking her nice little flat nose on the floor ; and will either demurely watch you use your hashi your chopsticks in respectful silence, or prettily converse, and even ofl'er her advice as to the most succulent morsels of the feast, and the best order in which to do them justice. A JAPANESE DINNER. 265 Before each guest is first placed a cake of sugared confectionery and some gaily-coloured leaf-biscuits, with a tiny transparent cup of hot tea. Then comes the first "honourable table," a small lacquered tray with lacquered bowls upon it, containing a covered basin of tsuyu-soup the "honourable dew" a little pot of soy, a gilded platter with various sweet and aromatic condiments upon it, and some wonderful vegetables, environing some fairy cutlets of salmon. You disengage your chopsticks from their silken sheath and prepare for action nor is it so very difficult to wield those simple knives and forks of Eastern Asia, if once the secret of the guiding finger between them be learned. Otherwise you will drop the very first mouthful from the soup- bowl upon your shirt front, to the gentle but never satirical laughter of your musume. Amid the talk which buzzes around, you will have inquired of her already in Japanese, "What is your honourable name?" and "How many are your honourable years ? " and she will have informed you that she is O Hoshi, Shika, Tsubaki that is to say, "Miss Star," " Miss Camellia," or " Miss Antelope "and that she was eighteen years of age, or otherwise, on her last birthday. Respectfully you consult Shika San as to what you should do with the fragrant and appetising museum of delicacies before you. She counsels you to seize that tiny lump of yellow condiment with your chopsticks, to drop it in the soy, to stir up and flavour therewith the pink flakes of salmon, and you get on very famously, watched a66 SEAS AND LANDS. by her almond eyes with the warmest personal interest. Now and again she shuffles forward on her small knees to fill your sake-cup, or to re- arrange the confusion into which your little bowls and platters have somehow fallen ; always with a consummate grace, modesty, and good breeding. And now, while you were talking with your neigh- bour, she has glided offend reappeared with another tray, on which is disclosed a yet more miscellaneous second service. Her brown, tiny, well-formed hands insinuate deftly within reach, as you kneel on your cushion, numerous saucers clustered round a fresh red lacquer basin of vegetable soup, wherein swim unknown but attractive comestibles. The combina- tions of these are startling, if you venture upon questioning ' the delighted Shika San, but you must be possessed of a courageous appetite, or you will subsequently disappoint the just expectations of "Miss Antelope." Here are shrimps, it seems, pickled with anzu (apricots), snipe subtly laid in beds of coloured rice, and kuri (chestnuts) ; wild goose with radish cakes, and hare (usagi), seasoned by preserved cherries, amid little squares of perfumed almond paste, and biscuits of persimmon. The piece de resistance is a pretty slab of fluted glass, whereon repose artistic fragments of fish mostly raw so grouped that the hues and outlines of the collection charm like a water-colour drawing. You play with your chopstick points among shreds of toko (the cuttle-fish), kani (crab paste), saba and hirame, resembling our mackerel and soles ; and are led by A JAPANESE DINNER. 267 the earnest advice of your kneeling musume to try, perhaps, the uncooked trout yamame. With the condiments her little fingers have mixed it is so good that you cease presently to feel like a voracious seal, and wonder if it be not wrong, after all, to boil and fry anything. Environed with all these tiny dishes, and lightly fluttering from one to another with no bread or biscuit, it is true, but the warm, strong sake WAITTNO MAIDS. to wash all down (for the glossy-haired musume keeps a little flask at her side for your special use) you are beginning at last to be conscious of having dined extraordinarily well, and also, perchance, of "pins and needles" in your legs. So you say Mo yorosliii "It is enough!" and now the service relapses a little for music and dancing. The shoji are pushed back at the far end of the 268 SEAS AND LANDS. room, and three musicians are discovered playing the samisen, the thirteen-stringed koto, and a kind of violin. Before them sit the best Geishas from Ki6to, and we are pleasantly weaned from our desultory dinner by a dramatic pas de deux, founded on the subjoined ideas : Hidari Jingoro was one of the most celebrated wood-carvers of Japan. He flourished in the early part of the seventeenth cen- tury Specimens of his work are to be seen in the great temples at Nikko and in Ki6to. The tradition represented in this dance is the Japanese " Pygmalion and Galatea." Hidari Jingoro having employed all the resources of his art to carve the image of a Kioto beauty to whom he is said to have been attached, succeeds so admirably that, one day, he suddenly finds the figure endowed with life and movement. But although the girl is there in the flesh, her soul is the soul of Jingoro she thinks with his thoughts, and moves with his move- ments. Jingoro would fain alter this, and convert the wooden image into Umegaye herself as well in the mind as in appearance. He considers that the object upon which all the feminine instincts of the fair sex are concentrated is a mirror. Accord- ingly he places a mirror in the girl's hand, and she, seeing her own face, immediately becomes Umegaye, and ceases to be a female replica of Jingoro. De- prived of the mirror, however, she loses individuality, and is once more a living automaton. The little musumes withdraw to the side-walls that we may better watch every step. Absolutely impossible is A JAPANESE DINNER. 269 it to describe with how much eloquence of pace and gesture the little girl in gold and blue dances and glances round the motionless girl in gold and scarlet, until she has charmed that black-eyed statue into life. And then the rapture ; the illusion ; the DANCING GIRLS. disillusion ; the anguish of watching the imitative- ness of that brown Galatea ; the joy when the mirror renders her individual ; the grief when without it she relapses into a living shadow of her dark-skinned Pygmalion ; the artistic graces 270 SEAS AND LANDS. developed and the dainty passages of emotion tripped to the simple but passionate music, with the gilded silken kimono floating and flutter- ing about those small bare feet, those slender bended knees ! The dance was a real piece of choregraphic genius, and the applause sincere when the sculptor and his lovely image bent themselves to the earth, and demurely resumed their cushions. Meantime, obeying Japanese etiquette, each guest in turn comes to the " guest of honour," asks leave to drink from his sake-cup, and obtain- ing it, raises the vessel to his forehead, drinks, rinses it in the water-bowl and fills it for his friend. When this is done, the " guest of honour " must go round and pledge his associates in the same way, while the three sides of the convivial square now for a time break up into chatty groups, wherein the musumes mingle like living flowers scattered about. But dinner is not nearly finished yet. Before each cushion there is again laid a lacquered tray none of the others being yet removed and this contains the choicest fish which can be pro- cured a whole one with his tail curled up in a garland of flower-buds, together with cakes, scented spice-balls, and sugar-sticks, which you are to eat if you can. If not able to cope with these new dainties, they will be put into pretty boxes and deposited in your carriage or jinrikisha indeed, it is necessary to be careful in leaving one of these entertainments, or you may sit on a boiled mullet, or a stuffed woodcock, or some cream-tartlets. A JAPANESE DINNER. 273 While we dally with the third service the Geishas dance again and again the last performance being full of comic grace. It was called the "Arashi- yama." Arashi-yama is one of the most celebrated spots in Kioto. Its cherry blossoms in spring and its maples in autumn attract thousands of visitors. Among the cherry-trees there was a little theatre called Mibu-do, where wordless plays used to be acted when the flowers were in full bloom. Here the Palace ladies were in the habit of coming every season, and their attendants enjoyed a picnic and extemporised plays for the ladies' amusement. The dance represented such a picnic. During the carouse a female enters, beautifully dressed, but wearing the mask of " Okame " (the colloquial term for a par- ticularly fat homely wench). The convives, persuaded that this disguise is intended to conceal uncommon charms, press her to drink ; and she, after receiving their attentions, suddenly removes her mask, ex- hibiting the face, not of a lovely damsel, but of the veritable Okame herself, the patron goddess of plain women. With wonderful spirit and charm the gay little danseuses performed this comedy, ending our long but never tedious dinner of five hours with a special figure called Sentakuya, or the "Washer- men's Trio." After this each musume led her guest by the hand to the hall. Shoes were resumed, carriages entered, and " honourable exits " made, in a dazzling forest of lighted paper lanterns, and a gentle tempest of Sayondras ("Farewell!") and Mata irrashais (" Come soon again ! ") S 274 SEAS AND LANDS. As for me, what the general impressions of a wanderer are of this fair and friendly land may be gathered most briefly from a speech drawn from me at an entertainment with which I was honoured at the Tokio Club, and of which, accordingly, I take courage to transmit the following passages from a too favourable local report I must avow to you, gentlemen, that I was not lured hither by any guide-book or volume of travel, though I have read most of those published about Japan ; but by a grammar. One of your most distinguished English fellow-residents here, whose literary work sheds lustre on the country of his birth and the community to which he belongs Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain has com- piled, as you know, a Japanese manual, which came before me in my editorial chair in London. I read casually in it, with much sudden interest as a student of languages and as an admirer of high manners, about Japanese verbs without any imperative mood, Japanese interjections without abuse or anger, strong expressions in Japanese free from all bitterness or blasphemy, and finally of a whole Japanese syntax constructed on the refined and gentle as well as eminently Christian principle of exalting another and depreciating one's self: -I felt I must visit a country characterised by these novelties. On my voyage across the Pacific I re-perused day by day that admirable grammar which, besides a perfect lucidity of method, by its style beguiles study, and possesses all the fascination of a romance ; but 1 arrived here in all the more complete perception of my ignorance, because I had learned how little I could learn. Yet honest ignorance without prepossessions has one advantage it is, like the sensitive plate of the camera, ready to receive and faithfully fix first impressions. Those are the only portions of a mere wayfarer's opinions in any way worth uttering or hearing, although the worth of even these is small. I blush indeed if a newspaper editor of thirty years can still successfully blush to speak at all of my four weeks' experience of Japan in presence of those who live here, but I feel that the impression will be enduring when I say that Japan astonishes, absorbs, delights, fascinates, and wholly contents me. I have never before visited any land where I envied so much the in- habitants and the residents, I doubt not that there is here, as A JAPANESE DINNER. 275 everywhere, another side to this sunny, gay, and picturesque existence which I see you all leading. Besides summer heats, earthquakes, and the distance from Pall Mall, whispers come to me of official dreams haunted by treaty revision, of administrative caprices, of political agitations, of diplomatic rivalries, and of religious discords. Yet, if Japan be not exactly a Paradise, it appears to me as close an approach to Lotus-land as I shall ever find. By many a pool of water-lilies in temple grounds and in fairy-like gardens, amid the beautiful rural scenery of Kama-Kura or Nikko ; under long avenues of majestic cryptomeria ; in weird and dreamy Shinto shrines ; on the white matting of the tea- houses ; in the bright bazaars ; by your sleeping lakes, and under your stately mountains, I have felt farther removed than ever before from the flurry and vulgarity of our European life. I have repeated to myself again and again those Greek verses from the Odyssey, which I may thus translate " Whoso has tasted the honey-sweet fruit from the stem of the lotus, Never once wishes to leave it, and never once seeks to go homeward : There would he stay, if he could, content with the eaters of lotus, Plucking and eating the lotus, forgetting that he was returning." And that I may clear myself from seeming too fanciful, I must be allowed to note, gentlemen, that you also have fallen under this inevitable charm. Your houses are embellished with the exquisite webs from the looms of Japan, with her delicate and playful conceits in ivory and bronze, with lovely trophies of your taste and of her charm in lacquer and enamel. You condescend to the gay jinrikisha, and you like, as all must, the soft ways and musical voices of your Japanese attendants. Best and noblest of all the proofs that this fair land enchants and constrains you, is the devotion to its service in public matters, in science, art, journalism, literature, and philology, abundantly illustrated by the many distinguished Englishmen present this evening. I am not forgetting the estimable work wrought by our foreign friends in most or all of these branches, when I declare that England and Japan are both of them deeply indebted to the English professors, teachers, engineers, editors, art lovers, and students who have linked their names so closely with the great Japanese renaissance. The discovery and research into Sanscrit by Anglo-Indians has done more to keep England and India permanently together than would another army of 100,000 men. If it might be without wrong or offence to other flags I could earnestly wish that English 276 SEAS AND LANDS. might become the second language of Japan. Already I see with pride that this is not impossible; and, speaking on behalf of very many at home, I respectfully thank those gentlemen whose labours have bestowed upon England so large a hope. To come down from great tokens to small, the inscriptions on the signboards, I observe, are mainly translated into English. Sometimes these are a little comic, but, passing one such the other day in a remote village, when my companion smiled, I remarked that five out of those funny eight words were of Sanscrit derivation, and I re- flected how natural it would be that, as her religion came of old to Japan from India, the guardians of India, themselves Aryan, should now become foremost in developing her literature, her resources, and her prosperity. I am honoured by the presence here this evening of many Japanese gentlemen whom I cordially thank for this proof of interest in the name and writings of one whose sole real title to the favour of so many Eastern friends is his earnest and abiding goodwill. I shall venture even more boldly to tell them what I have dared to tell my countrymen, that Professor Chamberlain's wonderful grammar in no wise misled me, and that I am glad I have lived to visit their great, beautiful, and friendly country. Yet what I find here more marvellous to me than Fuji-San, lovelier than the embroidered and gilded silks, precious beyond all the daintily carved ivories, more delicate than the Cloisonne enamels, is that ceaseless grace in the popular manners, that simple joy of life, that universal alacrity to please and be pleased, that almost divine sweetness of disposition which, I frankly believe, places Japan in these respects higher than any other nation. This sounds like exaggeration, and I shall be re- proached, perhaps, for praising so warmly from the depth of that ignorance which rny friend here, Mr. Gubbins, so well knows to be fathomless, a land where the women, who seem to me almost semi-angelic, 'enjoy by no means their proper rights, and where feudal laws have still left traces much too deep. But either I am an incompetent observer, or else there is to be met with, in all ranks of this country, an entirely special charm of demeanour, an exquisite finesse of mutual consideration, a politeness humble without servility arid elaborate without affectation, palpably spring- ing from graceful goodwill, all which lend a finer atmosphere to life, and render the courtliness of less naturally polished peoples well nigh a vulgarity. Retain, I beseech you, gentlemen, this national characteristic, which you did not import, and can never, A JAPANESE DINNER. 277 alas, export. Old Will Adams, the pilot of Queen Elizabeth whose name is preserved in a street in this city, and whose grave is on your shores, the first Englishman that ever saw them, wrote of Japan : " This countrie is gouerned with greate civilitie." So it is still ! I cannot express to you the subtle pleasure I have derived from contact with your common people in cities and railway stations, in villages, in tea-houses, and country roads. I have nowhere passed without learning lessons of finer manners than I knew before, and without being instructed in that delicacy of heart which springs from true goodwill and lies above all precept. How did Japan acquire this supreme social refinement ? In my ignorance I attribute it to three chief causes the happy mixture of blood which nature and history have blended in your veins ; the settled peace of two centuries given you by your re- nowned secular rulers; and the ever softening and ever human- ising influence of that religion about which I at least can never speak without reverence. I must, indeed, be bold to say that, wherever the doctrines of the Great Teacher of India have passed, they bring to the people adopting them, or partially adopting them, more or less of embellishment and elevation. Nay, I believe it impossible that the religious tenets of the Buddha should ever enter into the life of any large body of people without stamping on the national character ineffaceable marks of the placidity, the kindliness, the glad beliefs, and the vast consolations embodied in the faith of Sakya Muni. Nor, believe me, is it even possible, in spite of the grave authorities which assert the contrary to me, that Buddhism once entering a land should ever altogether and finally depart from it. You will instantly think of India, and remind me that the professed Buddhists there are to be numbered by scores or hundreds, but I must answer that all Hindoo India is Buddhist in heart and essence. The sea does not mark the sand more surely with its tokens than Gautama has conquered, changed, and crystallised the religious views of the Vedas and Vedantas, and so far from encouraging any one to hope that Buddhism will pass away from Japan, or from any other of its homes, I announce my conviction that it will remain here long enough to reconcile its sublime declarations with the lofty ethics of Christianity and with the discoveries of Science, and will be for all of you who love and serve the East, no enemy, but a potent, necessary, and constant ally. TOKIO, Dec. I, 1889. CHAPTER XVIII. THE RANGE OF MODEEN KNOWLEDGE. A REQUEST, very forcibly urged, on the part of the Japanese Educational Society, the Minister of Public Instruction, and some representatives of the Imperial University here, overcame my hesitation, and induced me yesterday to deliver the address of which I subjoin a report. I give it because it embodies the ideas and suggestions with which the scene and the people inspired me, and that I may be better able, in a subsequent chapter, to offer a description of the characteristic banquet, and above all of the deeply interesting and historical Cha-no-yu, or "Tea of Honour," which followed the feast, and at both of which I was the complimented guest. My address the imperfections of which, under the circum- stances of travel, I hope will be pardoned was delivered in the Lecture Hall of the Imperial Uni- versity, Viscount Enomoto, Minister of State for Education, presiding ; and my indulgent and intelli- gent audience included, besides, the Vice-Minister of Education, Mr. Tsuji Shinji, the United States Minister and Admiral, many Japanese professors, and Buddhist priests of the various denominations, together with five or six hundred of the students 278 THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 279 and their friends. Under the shoji of the large hall stretched far and wide the immense city, covering with its small black houses as large an area as London. Before me sate, or knelt, the flower of the Japanese youth, eager to hear ; and among them, with shaven heads and lappets of gold em- broidery, " the calm brethren of the yellow robe." Japanese ladies, in their pretty national kimono, honoured me by their presence, as well as many of my countrymen and countrywomen resident here. I had beside me the greatest of Japanese scholars- Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain to interpret, at the close, to those who could not follow my English, its general argument ; and, in brief, the occasion was one which demanded better gifts than mine. But to live in Japan is to love and to wish to serve her gentle and interesting people ; and therefore, without a single book of reference by me, and but a short time to meditate my speech, I did the best I could, as follows Honoured by an invitation to address this important society, my first impulse was very respectfully to decline for reasons of diffidence ; and when that appeared forbidden, because of the kind insistance of Mr. Chamberlain and of his Excellency the Vice- Minister of Education, my wish was to find some comprehensive topic easy for a scholar to handle far away from his books, and at the same time not without some utility. It seemed eventually that I should perhaps be least tedious if I boldly took for my theme " The Range of Modern Knowledge," and endeavoured to suggest in outline what is the present aspect offered by the world around us to an educated European of average acquaintance with literature, philosophy, art, science, and the general march of Western thought. Snch a topic would indeed imply arrogance and sciolism if it were not selected quite unpretentiously, and 2 8o SEAS AND LANDS. merely as a means of trying to represent to a Japanese audience some of the grounds on which the ordinary Englishman fixes his intellectual standpoints to-day, and some among the hopes, expec- tations, and beliefs with which he regards the future. I shall attempt, therefore, this afternoon, in the lightest possible manner, without any affectation of profundity or omniscience, to draw attention to a few among the landmarks which show how far our common progress has gone during the great reign of Queen Vic- toria, and perhaps shall speculate a little on what lies behind the visible horizons of our knowledge. Take, for example, Astronomy. How different is the concep- tion to-day of an ordinarily well-informed man from that of even the greatest mind in times but recently gone by ! All the religions of the world, let me ask you to notice, are still in the Ptolemaic stage as regards the infinite heavens surrounding us. They were one and all promulgated under the pervading idea that this little planet, our temporary home, was the actual centre of things, and that the stars were hardly more than pretty mysterious lanterns lighted to spangle our night-time. In your Japanese mythology the Sun Goddess is tempted from her cave of retirement by a mirror ; and in our Bible a Hebrew chieftain commands the Sun to stand still in order that he may complete a sanguinary victory. Your legend is possibly the less mythical of the two, for it is, indeed, with a prism and with a mirror the spectroscope that science has of late made the Sun emerge from mystery, and con- fess the elements of its own brightness and majesty. But all the religions have necessarily been pre-scientific in regard to astronomy, and have thus constructed their moral and cosmical systems on too slender a basis, until Galileo and Copernicus arose, and at one stroke altered for us the whole aspect of the universe. We now know our little earth to be, if not insignificant, still certainly, amid all its shining sisters, one of the youngest, smallest, and humblest. Yet, in compensation for this rebuke to our pride, and to the narrowness of theological teachings, how magnificent is that enlargement of our ideas of creation, now become quite common- place ! The very nearest of those fixed stars, as everybody is to- day aware, glitters so far away that its light occupies four years in reaching us ; and our Sun, which was thought the ruler of heaven, is recognised as but a lighted torch compared with Sirius or Alde- baran. At the same time Newton has taught us that all the orbs, great and small, in space are, and must ever be, linked together THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 281 by a subtle and perpetual bond of mutual influence. But if that illustrious discoverer could have employed the spectroscope and the stellar photography of our times, how vastly would even his grand ideas have been elevated by a wider knowledge of the im- measurable glory of the visible universe now revealed to common understandings ! Not only has this marvellous instrument, the spectroscope, proved to us the kindred nature of all those distant spheres, and enabled us actually to measure their rate of recession and approach, but the photographing-telescope may be said posi- tively to blind the imagination by the splendours which it unveils in the boundless range of those celestial fields of life. I lately stood in the well-known observatory belonging to Harvard College, Boston. One of its wonderful tubes was directed to a region of the sky, seemingly and even to the most powerful glasses blank ; but the sensitive plate fixed to the eyepiece announced the exist- ence there of a thousand nameless and previously unseen stars ; and to whatever part of the apparent darkness its finer eye con- tinued to be turned, always such, and not otherwise, was the superb report of countless new worlds, which it brought back from those black and fathomless abysses. A new meaning is surely given by these and other modern astronomical generalisations, for the thoughtful man, to that divine phrase of our New Testament, "In my Father's house are many mansions." There exist, indeed, stars enough now within sight to provide every human soul with a world apiece ; nevertheless, the greatness of man's destiny con- sists, as all may at last comprehend, not in fancying himself the centre of creation, but in belonging at all to so glorious and visible a galaxy of life, with the invisible effulgence and the infinite possi- bilities lying beyond it. Coming down from heaven to earth, the student of the Victorian Era perceives better than ever before how the forces of nature, once feared and deified, have really, during all past ages, been toil- ing, like faithful builders and humble masons, to finish and to beautify our planet home. The very earthquakes that now and again shake your city are the last fading vibrations of an original and stupendous terrestrial energy which elevated our mountains and depressed our valleys, and by the silent aid of the glacier, the rain-cloud, the wind, and the snow, carved out the surface of the earth into its present picturesque variety. We know not how long this globe rolled lifeless in preparation for the ancestry of man ; but we know how slowly he was developed, not succeeding to his 282 SEAS AND LANDS. estate until many lowly predecessors had brought the Pleiocene Age! All the best authorities now accept from Darwin that prin- ciple of evolution and of natural selection which, if it shows the descent of man to have flowed from no very aristocratic progenitors, implies, on the other hand, a continuous and an ennobling ascent, promising to lift the race, even in this sphere of things, to unknown heights. Modern chemistry again has rendered plain the material composition of our planet, as well as of the bodies which we in- habit. To the chemist's eye, man is made up, not of " clay " or " dust," as is ignorantly said, but of carbon, lime, water, phos- phorus, silicon, iron, and other high forms of matter; and all this by a natural proportion so well understood that a glass case at South Kensington exhibits the precise components of a human body, minus its vitality. Matter, itself, though to the philosophic insight the most immaterial of things, falls, for a chemist, into a well-ordered catalogue of some seventy elements, the atomic bricks with which Nature builds. We have even learned to take to pieces, and afterwards to imitate, her building. In the laboratory chemists can now combine from unexpected ingredients the once mysterious alcohol and urea ; they can produce salicylic acid, the bitter principle of the willow-tree, from coal-tar ; they can evolve from the same once wasted commodity, not only many brilliant colours, but saccharine, two hundred and fifty times sweeter than any sugar ; they can oxidise glycerine by means of pow- dered platinum, and so educe from it pure grape sugar ; they can manufacture, as Nature herself does, the dark blue dye of indigo and the ultramarine of artists ; and even create minutely the ruby and the diamond. There are boundaries to our constructive powers, no doubt, which we shall never pass, even by the subtlest methods of the alembic, since we have not at hand Nature's leisure and Nature's enormous forces. But immense discoveries for use and for ornament still evidently await the progressive chemist. Why, for instance, should he be always less wise than the mush- room, which knows how to turn the nitrogen of the atmosphere into wholesome food within a night ? Up to this hour no physio- logist can accurately tell you what becomes of that portion of the air which we breathe ; but the lowest fungus is well aware of it, and we also may some day hope to be. In a hundred directions Science, like a mother with her sleeve full of gifts, beckons her children onward to fresh secrets. Why is selenium so curiously sensitive to light 1 ? Why does 10 per cent, of aluminium give THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 283 to copper the strength of steel 1 And when shall we find that sovereign prophylactic, already half foreshadowed by the experi- ments of Tyndall, Koch, and Pasteur, which is to make zymotic diseases things of the past, or greatly to control and confine them 1 I once saw Professor Tyndall roll from hand to hand a tuft of carbonic acid gas, transformed by pressure into a visible substance ; but perhaps the most useful of all his exquisite labours have been those delicate researches into floating germs and organisms which, combined with M. Pasteur's invaluable achievements, have given medicine a new departure, and encouraged even the casual observer to hope soon for the most fruitful results for humanity. The famous Frenchman has already practically abolished the silkworm disease, splenic fever, and hydrophobia ; and we seem to know, or to be upon the point of knowing, through the microscope, the bacillus or seed-form of cholera, of consumption, and of malaria. The Victorian Era has thus led us pretty confidently to trust that the invasion of these evil germs into the human body will some day be either completely prevented, or neutralised by an easy remedy. In Astronomy, in Geology, in Chemistry alike on which I have so slightly touched, I hope we shall owe hereafter many solid debts to this society and to the Imperial University of Tokio. Everything comes to man from himself, by observation, by devotion, and by true, slow, and humble scientific methods. You cannot, gentlemen, import our civilisations ; you must make science Japanese by time and patience. Take the example of one whose name you will know and honour, Sir John Lubbock. I have the privilege of his friendship, and have watched those daily researches of his by which he has thrown so much interest- ing light upon the habits of ants, bees, and wasps, as well as on the structural marvels of the floral and the forest world. If you have read his delightful books and could afterwards see the simple arrangements which have produced them, those among you who are naturalists would be encouraged to attempt similar great and illuminating things for us in your richly gifted Japan. Wishing to find out the sense of colour, and to estimate the pre- ference for different flowers displayed by bees, you see Sir John sitting with watch and pencil in his garden at High Elms. On the turf lie pieces of paper, all equal in size and smeared with an exactly equal amount of honey, but variously tinted. In the summer sunshine the bees come and go, attracted by the honey. 284 SEAS AND LANDS. Selecting their favourite hue hecause they take the coloured papers for flowers they alight in numbers upon one of the squares, leaving the others comparatively neglected, and thus in a few hours we have obtained an answer from the hive itself, as clear and business-like as the popular vote which you will soon give for your new Imperial Parliament. Sir John showed me, not long ago, the little apparatus where his ant cities are kept. Tier above tier, in shallow boxes, isolated by water and closed by a double lid of glass and wood, he feeds and studies there the various species of that wonderful insect. He drew back the wooden lid from one large ant city, which revealed to me through the glass its tiny people in their daily life. There, in the central cell, was the Queen, imposing, majestic, isolated ; courtier ants stood round, always respectfully facing her majesty ; and attend- ants brought the pupce, or ant babies, in procession before the sovereign. Slave ants, dark of hue, performed in gangs the hard work of the city for the lighter coloured kwazoku * and shizoku of the community ; and small white wood-lice, quite blind, ran about by the by-ways carefully cleaning up all dirt and litter. You may think I am romancing, but far more wonder- ful facts reward such an observer as Sir John Lubbock. Indi- viduals in an ant city number from half a million to a million, and, incredible as it may seem, they all know each other. Imagine anybody recognising every single face in Tokio ; but these ants, whose brain is smaller than a pin's head, can surely do it! All this, for which I personally answer, discloses a new sense in these minute creatures ; while experiments made with the light-rays lying beyond the red and violet, totally invisible to- us, prove clearly that many small living things are quite as perfectly aware of those hidden beams as the magnetic needle is sensitive to the polar current which we cannot feel. No doubt to the eye of the dragon-fly, or of the Dytiscus beetle, altogether another world than ours is represented by the ordinary face of Nature, near and far. These facts carry the thought of the educated European as far downward into the lower regions of biology as the star-photo- graphs lift it upwards in the celestial regions. And everywhere alike he now sees at work the same grand principle of evolution. Near Sir John Lubbock's house is another one which I know, lately the home of the great Darwin, whereto scientific men of the future will make pious pilgrimage as to a shrine. I need not * The daimiot, or noblemeii, and the sawwrat, or swordsmen. THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 285 dwell upon the sublime life-work of that illustrious man. You know his books, no doubt, by heart ; if not, hasten to read them all, from " A Naturalist's Voyage in the Beagle " to that mar- vellous volume in which he shows us how the despised earthworm is one of the very best servants of mankind, and manufactures for us the soil that grows our barley and our rice ; and how the clover is impossible without the humble bee, with a thousand other abstruse secrets of Nature. But what I would venture to observe in connection with so renowned a name is that many Darwinists themselves are far as yet from discerning the full purport of their great master's conclusions. Evolution explains almost everything except itself. Yet surely Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest imply in the universe such an essential, and I had almost said such a passionate, impulse and effort towards universal amelioration that of themselves they might furnish a religion and a worship. Once dismiss the idle idea that death is an evil, thereby joyfully accepting Nature's law of perpetual unmaking and re-making, and then realise with what love and care, through what aeons of patient plotting, she must have meditated to pro- duce the sting of the scorpion almost the earliest creature of the rocks, yet furnishing a perfect model of the hypodermic syringe, invented by us as it were only yesterday. And again, look at her deep-sea fishes which, swimming in ocean darkness three thousand fathoms down, have a row of lamps fitted along each side to light them in pursuit of food. There is probably no human invention, from the net which your Shinagawa fisherman throws, to the electric lamp shining here on the Emperor's Palace, but Nature worked it out beforehand for our guidance, as in the spider's web and as upon the bellies of those fishes brought up by the Challenger's deep-sea lines. It is here that Buddhism, justly understood, touches the hand of modern science; and, if your patience permits, I will be bold enough to read from "The Light of Asia " a few verses which exactly express my view " Before beginning and without an end, As space eternal, and as surety sure, Is fixed a Power Divine which moves to good, Only its laws endure. This is its touch upon the blossomed rose, The fashion of its hand-shaped lotus-leaves ; In dark soil and the silence of the seeds The robe of spring it weaves ; j86 SEAS AND LANDS. That is its painting on the glorious clouds, And these its emeralds on the peacock's train ; It hath its stations in the stars ; its slaves In lightning, wind, and rain. Out of the dark it wrought the heart of man, Out of dull shells the pheasant's pencilled neck ; Ever at toil it brings to loveliness All ancient wrath and wreck. It spreadeth forth for flight the eagle's wings What time she beareth home her prey ; it sends The she wolf to her cubs ; for unloved things It findeth food and friends. The ordered music of the marching orbs It makes in viewless canopy of sky ; In deep abyss of earth it hides up gold, Sards, sapphires, lazuli. It slayeth and it saveth, nowise moved Except unto the working out of doom ; Its threads are Love and Life ; and Death and Pain The shuttles of its loom. It maketh and unmaketh, mending all, What it hath wrought is better than had been ; Slow grows the splendid pattern that it plans Its wistful hands between." Man, more nobly designed than any of his earthly predecessors, and placed at the head of the march of life, as we know it, grows to his perfectness less swiftly than those collateral projects of Nature. It is, meanwhile, a sufficient mark of the 'rudimentary con- ditions under which we all yet dwell that nations speak different languages and that science should to-day devote so much of her labour to deadly engines of war. But he who has drawn the true lessons of this Victorian Era knows well what useful virtues have sprung, and still spring, from the temper of the warrior, and how necessary war still is to protect peace and right. Indeed, if on a former occasion I have taken leave to praise the sweetness and grace of your popular manners, let me be bold now also, gentlemen of Japan, to bid you preserve against the temptations that are current the high courage, the dauntless patriotism, the dread of disgrace, and the love of honour, of which I find in your history a hundred noble examples. Bear with me while I add one word about the relation which all this seems to have to your own annals. THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 287 On that previous occasion, when I had the privilege of speaking to another audience of your countrymen, I dwelt upon the charms of your beautiful land and the graces of its popular manners. Looking at these things, not with the accustomed eye of an old acquaintance, I see them in their contrast and novelty, and the impression they make on me is all the more vivid. If, as a stranger, I may be pardoned the impertinence of offering a defi- nition, I should say that yours is a civilisation which has grown up in the placid atmosphere of secluded Asiatic life, developing fair features that to us, dwellers amid the clash and turmoil of competing nations, present an aspect of refreshing restfulness and content. We pray that you may be able to preserve those features, harmonising so well with your exquisite surroundings. But in the busier world of the West, from forth the keenness of rival intelligences and the emulation of vying races, there has been evolved another and not less valuable civilisation, one of active science and of ceaseless industry. Your story during the past twenty years shows that you appreciate the privilege of being introduced to that foreign civilisation, and that you understand the necessity of judiciously engrafting it upon your own. I have ventured therefore to tell you something about its intellectual side ; about the vast vistas of knowledge which it has exposed, and the grand conceptions it suggests of the destiny of humanity. Yoi; have now to take a high place in a busy world where this civilisation of science and industry counts for almost everything: and the old civilisation of grace and refinement, that which here "draws the last spirit of the Age of Gold," counts I grieve to say for comparatively little. Do not, I beg of you, think that because superficial observers like myself speak to you with enthusiastic delight of your ingrained courtliness, your graceful speech, and your gentle tolerance, we underrate by any such praise the solid qualities which makes nations great qualities which those who know you say you possess, and which your intercourse with Europe and America now gives you an oppor- tunity of displaying. If you are compelled to lose something of your old Japan in this crisis, the sacrifice must be regarded as inevitable for the sake of the new Japan. But I cherish the hope that your path of progress will never lead you entirely out of sight of your own peculiar refinements, and that the primary duty of national self-assertion will never finally efface that which is so special and so precious in your own charming civilisation. z88 SEAS AND LANDS. And now I must speak a little of Literature, my own special department, but chiefly to tell you with what reasonable belief the Englishman of the Victorian Era anticipates that what he fondly calls the " Queen's English " must eventually spread as the accepted and common tongue over the civilised globe. I put forward this opinion with some regret, as well as with a natural patriotism, because I know and love the " world-books " of France, Italy, and Spain, and take delight in the ancient literary riches of Greece, Rome, India, Persia, and Arabia ; while I cannot pretend that my mother-tongue is as musical as Cas- tilian or Tuscan, as graceful as Persian, or as perfect in its grammar as Sanscrit. But it is supremely wealthy in master- pieces of thought, fancy, and research; it has been consecrated and immortalised by the transcendent genius of Shakespeare, the greatest poet the world has ever seen ; and it is the speech to-day, remember, of all the powerful, intelligent, and ever-increasing American people, as well as of the Central Islands and the Colonies of that British Empire, the resources of which are at present so vast, the strength so inexhaustible, the wealth so boundless, and the national spirit so indomitable, that I should not dare to speak of them as I must speak, if it were not that the constant policy of England is peace, and her chief desire here and everywhere to win and keep the friendship of other nations. I am rejoiced, therefore, to notice how many Japanese gentlemen present to-day can follow, with as much intelligence as patience, my superficial observations, which I will now hasten to terminate, only adding that there is no treasure-house of art, science, or literature which the knowledge of the English language will not unlock for you. Why, then, have I told you, gentlemen, or endeavoured to tell you, in this capital city of Japan, how an educated English- man of the Victorian Age looks round the horizons of the scien- tific and philosophic departments laid open to him by bettor minds, and returns to his own studies glad of the present, and confident in the future? Why have I tried to show to you the Western scholar reflecting upon that newly revealed boundless- ness of the starry universe ; those subtle secrets of the microscope ; the chemist's brilliant analysis of Nature's atomic architecture ; the electrician's magic, utilised everywhere, but nowhere as yet understood ; the large generalisations of Darwin ; the settled reign of order and of law, seen even among such lowly communities THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 289 as those of the ants and the bees ; and the enchanted world of botany, where the flowers, for special reasons of their own, put in practice a thousand exquisite stratagems in order to grow yearly more beautiful? It is partly because these imperfect sentences express my own established persuasion of the divine purpose manifest for all of us alike in every corner of the world, and partly because this fair and civilised and gentle laud is ;il n-ady in possession not only of the spirit to appreciate the pur- port of such words, but has furthermore inherited special and lofty ideas from the neighbouring East to which these things belong, and by which they may be vastly illuminated. I have often said, and I shall say again and again, that between Bud- dhism and modern science there exists a close intellectual bond. When Tyndall tells us of sounds we cannot hear; and Norman Lockyer of colours we cannot see; when Sir William Thomson and Professor Sylvester push mathematical investigation to regions almost beyond the Calculus, and others, still bolder, imagine and try to grapple with, though they cannot actually grasp, a space of four dimensions, what is all this except the Buddhist Maya, a practical recognition of the illusions of the senses? And when I )ai win shows us life passing onward and upward through a series of constantly improving forms towards the Better and the Best, each individual starting in new existence with the records of bygone good and evil stamped deep and ineffaceably from the old ones, what is this again but the Buddhist doctrine of Dharma and of Karma ? And when the Victorian poet and preacher and moralist rightly discern and worthily teach, as the last and truest wisdom, that Justice, Duty, and Right control events, and that the eternal Equity and Compassion of the universe overlooks and forgives no wrong and no disobedience, but also neglects and forgets no good deed or word or thought, what is this except the teaching of the Buddha 1 Finally, if we gather up all the results of modern research, and look away from the best literature to the largest discovery in physics and the latest word in biology, what is the conclusion the high and joyous conclusion forced upon the mind, except that which renders true Buddhism so glad and hopeful 1 Surely it is that the Descent of man from low beginnings implies his Ascent to supreme and glorious develop- ments; that "the Conservation of Matter and of Energy," a fact absolutely demonstrated, points to the kindred fact of the con- servation and continuity of all Life, whereof matter is but the T 290 SEAS AND LANDS. apparent vehicle and expression ; that death is probably nothing but a passage and a promotion ; that the destiny of man has been, and must be, and will be worked out by himself under eternal and benign laws which never vary and never mislead ; and that for every living creature the path thus lies open, by compliance, by effort, by insight, by aspiration, by goodwill, by right action, and by loving service, to that which Buddhists term Nirvana, and we Christians "the peace of God that passeth all under- standing." At the conclusion of my address too kindly, too generously received there followed what I must crave leave to quote from the local journal. " It was admirably rendered into Japanese by Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain, whose wonderful command of the exceedingly difficult language of the country was well exemplified in his graceful and felicitous trans- lation. Afterwards Mr. Tsuji read in Japanese, and Professor Isawa in English, an acknowledgment of the pleasure felt by the society, and the honour con- ferred upon it, in receiving and hearing their guest. Mr. Tsuji said that whatever successes attended the society hereafter would always be associated with Sir Edwin's name, and that he carried with him the best wishes and most friendly regards of all the members." And then ensued the Japanese banquet in the " Hall of Clouds," amid the plum-trees of Ueno ; a feast of four or five hours, with the sake- cups going gaily round, and the little musumes, like butterflies, flitting about with go-zcns and samisens, and after that the Cha-no-yu ! apotheosis of tea- drinking a ceremony delightful, mysterious, archaic, profound, which I will attempt to describe and ex- ftt&JU THE RANGE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 293 plain hereafter ; for without such experience every tea-drinker in the world remains little aware of the sublimity, the antiquity, the grace, the art, and, I had almost added, the religion which may attach to the tea-cup. TOKIO, JAPAN, Dec. 16, 1889. CHAPTER XIX. SAKE AND TEA. ABIOSTO has, in his great poem, a canto commencing " Donne ! e voi ctiavete le donne in pregio" whereby he begs that no lady will read the severe reflections which follow upon the foibles of her sex. I, on the contrary, venture most respectfully to invite all ladies to read this present letter, that they may know how distinguished is the origin of the tea-cup and the tea-tray, what immense social and historical effects their favourite beverage has pro- duced, and with how much grace and ceremony the simple act of tea-drinking may be, and is, in this gentle land of Japan, constantly invested. For my own part, a perfectly new sentiment has been kindled in my breast towards the whole mystery of the teapot since I had the honour of being entertained at the Cha-no-yu, in the " Hall of Clouds." Over the spirit of every one who arrives as a stranger in Japan, whether or not, by habit or by taste, a votary of the tea-leaf, a change in this respect slowly and surely steals. The importance and dignity of tea reveal themselves in an entirely new light when he finds a whole population of some forty millions concentrated, so to speak, round the BRINGING SAKE SAKE AND TEA. 297 teapot, and all the dwelling-houses, all the habits, all the tastes, the very language, the meals, the diurnal duties and associations of town and country folk alike, circling, as it were, about the tiny cup. Insensibly you also fall into the gentle passion. You learn on your road while journeying, or when arriving at its end, or in entering a friend's house, or while shopping in the " Ginza," to expect and to accept with pleasure the proffered draught of pale yellow, fragrant liquid ; which at first you only tole- rate, appearing as it does without milk or sugar, but afterwards begin to like, and lastly to find indispensable. Insensibly the little porcelain cup becomes pleasantly linked in the mind with the snow-pure mats, the pretty, prostrate musumes, the spotless joinery of the lowly walls, the exquisite proprieties of the latticed shofis, adding to all these a charm, a refinement, a delicate sobriety and dis- tinguished simplicity found alike amid high and low, emanating, as it were, from the inner spirit of the glossy green leaf and silvery blossom of the tea-plant in one word, belonging essentially to and half constituting beautiful, wonderful, quiet, and sweet Japan. All this arises from the entertainment with which I was honoured, as mentioned in my last chapter, wherein I gave you part of my address before the University, and mentioned the Japanese banquet in the " Hall of Clouds " and the Cha-no-yu (or " Tea of Honour") which followed it for myself and a select few. Dinners in the native fashion have 298 SEAS AND LANDS. now become so familiar, by my happy fortune in making friends among the native gentlemen, that I am conscious of having lost those first impressions which enable one to paint accurately a novel scene. But I have not lost my early admiration of them, and still continue to regard a well-appointed and properly-served Japanese dinner as one of the most elegant and agreeable, as well as satisfying, forms of " dining-out " which the genius of hospitality ever invented. Like the dwellings, the apartments, and the appointments of Japan, one of these enter- tainments closely resembles another in the methods and the menus. I sate or rather kneeled lately at a large banquet given by Mr. Okura, a very wealthy merchant, at his country seat in Mukojima, a suburb of Tokio. The ride thither took us clear through the vast city into a rural quarter upon the bank of the chief river. The guests, including many of the present Ministers of the Emperor's Cabinet, assembled first of all in a smoking pavilion, overlooking the stream, richly adorned with carvings and chased brass ornaments, and warmed by a huge hibachi, or fire-box. Here we were served by kneeling musumes with tea, vermouths, and little balls of sweetened millet ; and then proceeded through many passages glistening with polished pine and cherrywood to the shuko-do, or dining- chamber. Sitting here on little square cushions every guest having his fire-box beside him a girl in flowing embroidered robes and bright satin obi appears before each, and places the first tray within SAKE AND TEA. 299 his reach. There will be upon it a little lacquered bowl of soup, a saucer of legumes, a tiny dish of cutlet, or ragout, a bowl of snowy boiled rice, a sake-cup, and a pair of new chopsticks. The guest of the evening gives the signal to start by begin- ning to wield these latter, and then all is festivity and joyous chat sans gSne. Your pretty musume, having well started you, kneels in front of your tray, armed with a porcelain flask of rice-wine, warmed ; and if she can help it she will not allow your little red saucer to remain unbrimmed. My fortunate cushion was placed between the American Minister's and that of Count Saigon, the President of the Imperial Marine Department, whose brother headed the Satsuma rebellion many years ago and lost his head. The Count was loyal, and has risen to high office a frank, hearty, English- looking statesman, whose merry conversation made one often neglect the choice dishes which followed the first service in lavish variety. At perhaps the third tray when the second soup and the thin slices of raw fish, the daikon and the vermicelli with almonds, have appeared, and m;.;iy a cup of sake has warmed the " honourable insides " of the con- vives the sound is heard, behind the screen at the end of the room, of the samisen and the koto, and, being pushed back, it reveals the musicians and the dancers. These last the Geishas wear always very gay apparel, and are extremely well trained in their graceful odori. But you would be wrong to think that any Japanese woman may 300 SEAS AND LANDS. put on the splendid and showy kimonos borne by the Maiko. There is a very strict social rule in Japan that after the twenty-first year of her age a girl must no longer don bright colours ; she then assumes the sober tints of grey, dark-blue, dove- colour, and brown ; so that, practically, only the quite young female people assume the gorgeous garments in question. When the Geishas have finished one or two well-known dances, and have been applauded with words of approval and clapping of hands, one comes back to the little trays, now encircling each guest as boats surround a ship in harbour, and plays again with the chopsticks among the entremets, the cakes, the candied fruits, and^, perfumed "kickshaws" which complete the service. Or one lights a cigarette, or kiseru ; or rises from his cushion to go, first to the host, and afterwards to every well-known friend in the circle, kneel- ing down before him, and saying, Ippai Kudasai, " Permit me to drink with you in my own cup." The person thus invited rinses his sake-cup in the hot-water bowl, and hands it to you ; you raise it to your forehead, and presenting it to the musume to be filled, quaff it, rinse it anew, and hand it to your friend, who lifts it to his head, has it re- plenished, and drinks, bowing low, adding such a sentence as me ni kakaru kara taksan o tanoshimi gozaimas i.e., "I am very happy to have hung in your honourable eyes." By this time the conversa- tion has grown animated ; the companions of the banquet are gathered in friendly groups ; the gaily- SAKE AND TEA. 301 clad musumes flit about with vases of rice-wine, or converse lightly and prettily with the guests, who may offer them a cup of sake, and flirt a little. If you have known how to select the most satisfactory dishes, and have not made the mistake of swallowing whole what looked like a sugared chestnut, and turned out, too late, to be a lump of fiery mustard, cayenne, and soy, the entertainment has abundantly satisfied the appetite, besides grati- fying the sight, the hearing, and the spirit generally. When, amid a buzz of joyous farewell talk, your musume wraps you in your fur coat, and, while you slip again into your shoes on the threshold, knocks her pretty brow upon the matting, mur- muring, Sayonara ! mata o ide nasare ("Good-bye! be pleased to come again"), you enter your jinri- kisha and roll off through the streets glittering with paper lanterns and lively with thousands of clattering feet, repeating to yourself, " Fate cannot harm me. I have dined to-day ! " Such was, in slightest outline, our dinner at Mukojima, where I left the Minister of Marine deep in a gay discussion with two Geishas and a musume, as to the proper words of a celebrated song. The banquet at the "Hall of Clouds" being in connection with the University, and largely attended by imperial professors, wore somewhat graver aspects, and there were present, besides, some distinguished Buddhist abbots, as well as the youthful head of one of their sects. The chief priest, by the way, though he went through the 3 o2 SEAS AND LANDS. friendly ceremony of drinking from my cup, raised it simply to his forehead ; either he did not touch what the Buddha forbade, or would not let me see him do it. There were also no dancine and O no music, for the Cha-no-yu was to follow, and nothing in the least frivolous must mingle with that. Duly, when the dinner was finished, the chief guests, six or seven in number out of the forty or fifty present, repaired to the little room set apart for the ceremony. Approaching its entrance we all washed our hands with water from a small wooden ladle, out of a white wooden tub. Above the door were written characters which meant " Hospitality, courtesy, purity, tranquillity ! " We passed into a tiny apartment, of spotless ap- pearance, provided with mats, cushions, an antique tea equipage, a glowing hearth sunk in the floor, and one hanging picture, very old, which we were directed to admire and criticise. Our places are prescribed round the floor, with careful politeness, by the aged servitor. Sitting thus quietly but gaily in the little snow-clean alcove, the talk turns upon the origin of the Cha-no-yu, and what it has done, not only for Japanese art, manners, and national life, but, if anybody reflects rightly, for the whole civilised world. It is really to Buddhism that civilisation owes the tea-leaf, and its immense place at the present day in the affections and the commerce of mankind. The plant is indigenous to Japan, but the " calm brethren of the yellow robe" brought with them into Japan, along with SAKE AND TEA. 303 their gentle religion, the art of using it. Up to the time of our Wars of the Roses tea in Japan was still so rare that soldiers received small pots of it as gifts of honour, and infused it in special feasts among their friends as a precious beverage. The great Regent Yoshi-tsune', retiring from power, personally established its universal use in Japan, and indirectly gave, by his far-off foresight and refined taste, five o'clock tea to the Duchess in Belgravia ; and also to the student, the washer- woman, and the sempstress " the cup that cheers." He and his friend Shuko, a Buddhist priest, in- vented the tea pavilion, and drew up the first rules of the Cha-no-yu. But though these great minds so early popularised tea-drinking in Japan, and doubtless intended to simplify it, the fashion long remained aristocratic. The nobles were wont to sit over their tea-cups gambling for gilded armour, and even for precious sword-blades, which the winner would often lightly give away to the pretty flowery - robed Geishas, who danced, sang, and waited for them. It was reserved for the low-born but powerful and accomplished Taikoon, Hide'yoshi, " the Augustus of Japanese History," to stamp the cult of the tea-leaf with that enduring grace, sim- plicity, and charm which have made tea-drinking the central act of Japanese life, and even built all their houses and apartments on the same undeviat- ing pattern. Hideyoshi had for his Meccenas Sen- no-rikiu, another Buddhist priest, and the two together reformed the Cha-Scki by making it before 3 o 4 SEAS AND LANDS. all things intensely simple. Ostentation was ostra- cised. The four great qualities which the Seikasha the Tea-Drinker was to celebrate and cultivate over the sacred cup were hospitality, courtesy, purity, and tranquillity. The apartment must be plain, but elegant, with spotless mats and simple joinery ; the utensils must be uncostly, but ex- quisite in shape and fitness. Temperance must be absolute ; if food and wine mingled with the little feast nobody must exceed one bowl of rice and three saucers of sake. Nor was it solely for love of grace and the four chief virtues of the tea-room, Ka-kei-sei-jaku, that the famous Taikoou inaugurated the cult of the tea-leaf. His great mind saw that if he could give Japan a national and tranquil habit, easy of practice for the poor and attractive to the rich, he would do much to sheathe the sword and humanise his people ; and so it has turned out. Never, in truth, had a statesman's subtle device such grand success. The tea- cup, as I have said, is to-day the central fact of this fair and gentle land. It decides the architecture, binds together the societies, refreshes the fatigue, and rewards the day's work of high and low in Japan. The perspiring jinrikisha man is satisfied with the warm infusion ; the Minister and the Mikado himself are only happy when the " honourable tea " exhales its delicate fragrance from the hands of the kneeling musunw. And there are little gracious ceremonies even about the SAKE AND TEA. 307 most ordinary tea-drinking in humblest houses, which everywhere elevate it above a mere beve rage. Good manners in Japan prescribe a sort of soft solemnity whenever the little cup is being filled, and no hut is so lowly but its kettle, its teapot, and its tea equipage display something about them of distinction, taste, and the love of a chaste and perfect art. But the Cha-no-yu, as Hideyoshi and Sen-no- rikiu settled it for ever, carries these ceremonials to a grave perfection. To be quite orthodox the tea-room must be very small, one of but four and a half mats, roofed if possible with a single finely grained plank, or else thatched with bamboo grass. The few honoured guests should be called to the pavilion by wooden clappers, washing their hands first in pure water. No discontented person must be present, nor any scandal, or flattery, or unkind words be heard. The host himself should mend the fire, light the incense, brush the mats, fill the white- pine ewer, and lay the ladle of red-pine ; as well as see that the single picture is hung and the single flower-pot fairly set in its place. The tea should be of the finest green powder, from a beautiful but common little jar ; placed in a cup of ancient design holding, perhaps, half a pint. The " honourable " hot water is poured upon it, and then stirred in with a small bamboo whisk, which article itself, like the tiny spoon of the same material used for taking out the tea powder, must be of a certain form, and, if possible, ancient, and famous for its artistic origin. 3 o* SEAS AND LANDS. Even about the boiling of the water there is orthodox tradition, there is solemnity, I had almost said there is religion. The sunii in the brazier must be piled up in the outline of a glowing Fuji- San. The kettle of beaten iron must have no touch of modern vulgarity in its shape, the water must be drawn from the purest source, and at the moment of use in the third state of boiling. The first state is known by its low murmuring, and the appear- ance on the surface of the large slow bubbles dis- tinguished as " fish eyes," gyo-moku ; the second is when steam comes with quickly rising foam ; the third is when the steam disappears in a tranquil, steady simmer, and the fluid is now " honourable old hot water." This is the propitious moment for the admixture, which being compounded appears in the guise of a light-green frothy compound, deli- cately fragrant and invigoratingly hot, contained in the antique cup, which, neatly folded in a fair cloth, should be handed now to the principal guest. Drinking reverently from it, he should tenderly wipe the rim at the spot where he has quaffed, but the next guest must drink at the very same place, for such is the "Kiss of brotherhood," in harmony with the friendly inspirations of this ceremony. The last guest must be heedful to drain the bowl to its dregs ; then he passes it round to be exa- mined, criticised, and made the subject of pleasant talk about the old days, the canons of true art in pottery, or any other topic lightly arising from the graceful moment, as the tender fragrance of the tea- SAKE AND TEA. 311 leaf wafts itself about the air of the little spotless chamber and among the kneeling, happy, tranquil companions of the occasion. At a glance it will be seen how imperiously these elegant ceremonies, once established and received, have dictated to Japan the pure simplicity of her ceramic and metal work, and how they have passed down into all ranks of the people, constituting a standard of sweet and simple manners and of high-bred tastes which they were quicker to accept than any other nation. Perhaps nowhere except in Japan would it have been possible even for the great Hideyoshi and the astute Sen-no-rikiu to have indoctrinated a whole people with so pure and re- fined a passion. But the commonest Japanese have this charming tendency to a delicate sobriety of appetite and taste ; they love the touch of art which elevates, the glimpse of grace which dignifies. They have the nature rather of birds or butterflies than of ordinary human beings, and when you send out to your Kurumaya a cup of tea and a saucer of boiled rice, and hear afterwards his grateful words, you wonder whether he is of the same race as that which you left quaffing half-and-half and eating rump-steaks on the banks of the Thames. Of course the austere etiquette of the Cha-no-yu is special ; but its spirit, as the central ceremony of tea-drinking, has palpably passed through all Japan, where everything begins and ends with the tetsubin and the tea-cup. Nor is it too much to declare that to Buddhism, which brought in her religious 3i2 SEAS AND LANDS. ideas and the tea-leaf, and to Hideyoshi, who taught her how to honour, enjoy, and infuse it, is due much, if not most', of the existing aspect of social and civic Japan. TOKIO, JAPAN, Dec. 19, LIGHT REFRESHMENT. CHAPTER XX. AT HOME. IP some of those countless friends at home, of whom the Christmas season brings such warm re- membrances, could be transported hither on the magic carpet of Asiatic fiction it would puzzle them at first to know to what land they had been conveyed. This drawing-room where I write, with walls of gilt paper and soft Oriental carpets, easy-chairs in cosy corners, and the numberless little signs of feminine taste and decoration imparted by a lady's hand, might make the house seem at first like some Indian bun- galow. I Jut in the middle of the apartment rises a pillar of dark cherry-wood, erected there just as it was felled, except for a little polish and some care- less chisel marks, supporting a ceiling of unpainted joinery, delicately finished, but left in the original beauty of the fir-wood. Moreover, two of the four \\alls of the pretty and pleasant room are composed of framed glass through which one looks over a charming garden, where artificial mounds, tiny pools, and winding pathways are overhung by the bamboo and the palm, which might appear Indian enough, but for being interspersed with camellias, camphor-laurels, and pine-trees. India, therefore, 3*5 316 SEAS AND LANDS. it could not be ; but yet if, still uncertain and puzzled, the imaginary friend should proceed to lightly clap together his hands (our way of bell- ringing here), the mystery would be quickly solved, for the gilded shoji would promptly roll back from one or other of the corners of the chamber, and O Tori San, plumpest and most cheerful of Japanese waiting-maids, would appear to the summons upon her little hands and knees, probably also on her nose, with shining black marble hair, comely girdled kimono, little pigeon feet in cloven white socks, and that ejaculatory Hi! hi! with which she always announces obedience to the behests of her young mistress. Furthermore the shoji, rolling aside, would disclose vistas within of white matted floors, latticed screens covered with transparent paper, polished dark passages which no boot or shoe profanes, and dusky servants flitting about in wide-sleeved dresses, besides jinrikishas standing at the door, and clogs and waraji lying on the door- step ; in fact, the usual aspect and features of a real Japanese domicile. In truth, we are housed and very pleasantly housed for some time to come as what may be called honorary citizens of this vast capital of Japan. Not that you would ever dream, looking through the latticed sides of the dwelling upon the garden, that the residence stood almost in the very centre of an enormous city. Tokio is so full of green spaces, gardens, and hills, that only in certain quarters do you see close-packed and densely- AT HOME. 317 populated streets and lanes. Upon the eminence of Imai-ch6, where our abode is situated, the air is fresh and smokeless as in the farthest country, and the view extends, over groups of black and white shops and dwellings, to many acclivities, verdant and pleasant like this, and crowned, as this is, with agreeable villas and lightly framed buildings sur- rounded with groves and pleasure-grounds. A run in the house-jinrikisha will take you very quickly into the midst of long streets and lanes swarming with the picturesque population, and we are, indeed, " near everything," without any of the drawbacks of a capital. At night the neighbourhood is as quiet as the street of a rural village, the only sounds heard being the amma's cry passing the gate, and the echo of the watchman's wooden clappers. The atmosphere is always pure and clear, albeit a million and a quarter of Japanese live between our bamboo thickets and the sea's edge, for there are no chimneys the houses burn no fuel except the cleanly char- coal ; and Fuji-San, the queen of mountains, though she is distant some sixty-five miles, for this reason daily lifts her snowy peak to our view in the west- ward region. It is now midwinter in Japan, and not the season of Mowers moreover, a nightly frost binds the little lotus-pool in the garden with thick ice. Yet we have hardy roses and camellias blossom- ing round us, and the rich variety of evergreens, mingling with the acclimatised cycads and bamboo, furnishes perpetual verdure. In the spring we shall be embosomed in the pink and white blossoms of SEAS AND LANDS. the plum and cherry trees, which just now are bare. At our garden gate stands a Shinto temple, especially famous for the splendour of its double cherry blooms, the absence of which is now supplied by wreaths of dried leaves and festoons of white paper suspended on the red torii, or portals, of the silent shrine. If you wish to plunge into the busy COOLIES. bright life of the city it is but to descend the hill, to pass the jinrikisha stand and the old Daimio's dwell- ing, and then to turn a corner by the massive fortress wall, and you will be among the odd little shops, the clattering pattens, the mothers and sisters with the babies on their backs, the children kite-flying, the traders sitting over their glowing charcoal braziers ; the hawkers of fish, dried radish, cakes, persimmons, AT HOME. 319 toys, pipes, kites, and flags ; the coolies with their balanced loads ; the blind old samisen players : the Buddhist priests ; the pretty musumes with hair like black marble and pigeon feet; the imperturb- able slit-eyed babies ; the acquaintances meeting in the street and profusely bowing and saluting ; the Japanese officers riding along, each with his betto, or groom ; the flower pedlars ; the bullock-men ; the bird-dealers ; the tea-houses, the little funny house fronts, and opened interiors ; the bath-rooms, the temples, the stone-yards, the basket-works, the gliding rice-boats, tout le tremblement, in fact, of the wonderful and ever-interesting capital city of Japan. To be permitted thus to reside in the Japanese metropolis is not very readily granted to a foreigner who has no official or diplomatic status. My prede- cessor in the tenancy was in Government employ, and so much goodwill has been shown to me by high Japanese dignitaries that no difficulty was apprehended in the temporary succession. But the Foreign Office at Tokio is precise and logical, and could not consequently accept the theory of a guest who paid rent. I was therefore finally and obligingly appointed tutor en titre to the amiable family of my landlord, who lives close by, and that office I have the honour to occupy at present upon a salary which would be nominal if it did not include the pleasure of hearing my accomplished pupils often play upon the samisen and the koto. Upon this basis we have established excellent relations, and O Fuku San, with her charming sister, has just 320 SEAS AND LANDS. now called round to bring my daughter some hagoita battledore and shuttlecocks now all the fashion. And if the stipend of this new appointment is nil, so, too, are its responsibilities. I revise the MY TEACHER. MSS. of a Japanese history in its English trans- lation for Chief-Inspector Asso, and he kindly polishes up my Japanese ; so that we give just a little touch of actuality to the status which enables AT HOME. 3*1 me to be domiciled temporarily as a citizen of Tokio. Even the Bishop of Japan, a dignified and popular neighbour in my quarter, resides there only as a schoolmaster, not as a Christian prelate. The difficulties which have arisen about treaty revisionvery far as yet from being settled render the Japanese Government, it would appear, more particular than ever. For our household staff we have a cook, with his wife and girl-baby, a gardener, a jinrikisha-puller, x 322 SEAS AND LANDS. or kuruma-ya, the Japanese maid, and my own man, Mano, with his wife. The cook, named Nakashima Yasuzo, dresses in the conventional white for his official duties, but takes orders on his knees and forehead in a dark-blue dress covered all over with red-and-white dragons. He is very skilful and inventive, and can serve up as good a dinner as anybody needs. His accounts, presented in the Japanese kata-kana rather puzzling to his young English mistress are cast up upon the native soroban, or abacus, which is in universal use, and seems never to mislead. It is especially in dressing fish the favourite Japanese food that Nakashima is ingenious, and, indeed, almost exhaustless ; but he can achieve almost anything in either European or native style. The kuruma-ya, or jinrikisha man, is styled Watanabe Shuzo, and lives always at call to trundle one or other of us from end to end of the city with his tireless quick trot and twink- ling little legs. He has just brought in the special suit of clothes presented to him for the New Year, of dark blue linsey, with white discs and flying storks all over it, and upon the back, between the shoulder-blades, a large letter " A " embroidered, the initial of his owner's name. It is pleasant to possess, and thus perpetually to command, a two-legged steed of this sort, who never shies, nor bolts, nor stumbles, and will go as readily fifty miles as five. The gardener, Suzuhi Kanzo, is a small and silent Japanese, irresistibly AT HOME. 323 recalling the "Ace of Spades" of "Alice in Won- derland," as he flits about with a little hoe, a little pair of shears, and a little broom, amid his plants THE SISTERS. and flowers, or carries water to the bath-room, which latter is a very simple and peculiar apart- ment in the Japanese manner, with huge wooden 3 2 4 SEAS AND LANDS. tubs of "honourable hot water," and a grated floor. Among the many nice characteristics of the Japanese is their love of perpetual bathing. Everybody who has not private conveniences for this purpose goes daily to a public bath faro-do and parboils himself or herself in water of a temperature beyond the endurance of any European skin. They are in consequence the cleanest of people, but make no more of stripping to bathe in common than we of taking off our gloves. Yoshida Tori, my daughter's maid, deserves a paragraph to herself. Plump, rosy-cheeked, and always smiling, she is a personification of the sweet temper of all Japanese damsels and of the population generally. The daughter of a samurai, or well-born swordsman, she has learned admirable manners, and has evidently been well educated ; but performs, all the same, her household duties as if they were a source of positive delight, In bringing a message, receiving an order, offering tea or cakes, or doing anything which is not absolutely instantaneous, she always goes down on her little knees, and often also upon her little nose, and never permits her master or mistress to enter or quit the house without hastening outside to kneel and bend low upon the doorstep. Twice a week somebody, with the necessary artistic skill, comes to dress her black marble hair with camellia oil, inserting in its glossy masses coloured puffs of silk and wool, and kanzashis, or ornamental pins. These pins are a great article of trade in every bazaar, designed in all sorts of shapes and AT HOME. 327 patterns, and with the gayest imaginable ornamenta- tion ; but the favourite mode is a hairpin of gold and coral, or one imitating a spray of cherry-blossom. When O Tori San has been properly coiffee, with a representation of Mount Fuji rising in a peak from THE GARDENER'S WIKE. her small brow, and enormous shining puffs con- structed behind and before, she must sleep, like all the rest of her sex here, with her head upon a makura. This is the tiny wooden pillow, in outline 328 SEAS AND LANDS. something like an anvil, having rolls of paper on the upper hollow, and two little drawers below, where the kanzashis are deposited every night. Upon this apparently most uncomfortable prop all feminine Japan reposes its head, or neck, at sleeping time ; for the ordinary pillow or bolster would make a complete wreck of those shining puffs and peaks and well- oiled bandeaux. In the morning, while dusting and sweeping, O Tori San covers the elaborate structures of her hair with a blue and white handkerchief, which is also of universal use in Japan, the women spreading it over their heads like a cap or bonnet, the men twisting and knotting it round their shocks of black bristling hair. Wonderful to behold, more- over, are the obi which our Japanese Abigail puts on from day to day ; gay and glittering folds of liveliest hue, so arranged as to hang upon the small of her back, like a valise, or writing case, made of gold and flowers. When suddenly summoned by clapping of hands, O Tori San, in whatever part of the house, utters a loud and ready " Hai ! " and after- wards, while receiving the order, ejaculates in quick succession a series of he ! he I lie ! he's ! concluding with a deep obeisance, and the word Kaslikomariin- ashta, "I have assented." She is fond of gliding into the drawing-room, and silently sitting there for the sake of company, for in this gentle land the distance is not great between servants and masters. Last night, while reading by lamplight, the distant rumble of an earthquake was heard by AT HOME 329 us ; and before the strange deep noise had well gathered up into the now too well-known thunder and rattle of the dread jishin, the little Japanese maid had precipitated herself through the slioji, and was on her knees at the feet of her young mistress. " The more you know of earthquakes," she after- wards said, " the less you like to be alone in one." A WOMAN StEEPING. O Tori San, amid other duties, is, indeed, one of my teachers in Japanese, and whenever I come to a general sentence in the reading-book it is " Andne ! " " The plum-blossoms of Ueno were beautiful last year ; did you go to see them ?" whereupon she says, "He! miemasen" ("I did not see"); and a more or less lively exercise in irregular Japanese gerunds 330 SEAS AND LANDS. and participles ensues. The colloquial tongue can- not be called difficult to acquire, when once 'a sufficient vocabulary has been mastered, but the modes of thought with the Japanese are different from ours, and great care is necessary to avoid blunders in the established etiquette of using honorific words to others and depreciatory expres- sions as regards yourself. To command a correct and refined speech and to know the kata-kana and "grass writing" of Japanese would naturally be a work of years instead of months. Amid these pleasant and placid domesticities, in the bright comfort of our Japanese home, we live, for the time being, as happily as can be imagined. At seven A.M. O Tori San pushes back the shoji from the room, where I sleep on the floor under padded quilts, called futons, and, letting in the splendid sunshine of the Japan morning, ejaculates " Ohayo ! " and slides my gozen, the early breakfast- tray, to my side. Then she shuffles about, attend- ing to the bath and toilette of her young mistress, and bringing in the fire-boxes, while the " Ace of Spades" fetches water, the Kuruma man cleans his jinrikisha, the cook buys the provisions for the day, the cook's wife plays with her baby or her samisen, and Mano and his wife polish, and dust, and sweep. On New Year's Day we must not have any cleaning or dusting ; it would brush away the good luck of the coming year, in honour of which great festival our gates, like those of every house, hut, and shop in Tokio, are at present decorated with Japanese AT HOME. 333 national flags and the Kadomatsu. There are erections of pine, bamboo, and sprays of evergreen put up on either side of the gate or door, adorned with oranges, flowers, festoons of rope and paper, and sometimes with dried boiled crayfish. All these things are emblematic of luck and goodwill, and everybody must also eat mochi rice or bean cake at this important era, and say, Mazu akete mashite, o medetd gozaimas, " At this opening year, I wish you happiness." If you can stand a little bit of Japanese poetry, here is one of the verses they sing about the fir- bushes and decorations " Kadomatsu wa Meido no tabi no Ichi-ri zuka ; Medet6 mo ari, Medetd mo nashi ; " which may be closely interpreted " The gateway-pines we plant Are milestones of Life's road, Marking the stages passed ; And glad the way for some, And sad for some the way ! " Presents of love, goodwill, and compliment fly about in every direction. They must be tied up in a par- ticular manner, with certain kinds of string, and bearing little paper symbols called noshi. Anything will do ! we are a simple people in Tokio. Miss Asso, in exchange for a box of bonbons, has, as before remarked, just brought us some battledores 334 SEAS AND LANDS. and shuttlecocks. Half the city is playing with these as the latest fashion, or flying kites. Dried salmon are in especial favour as presents. I feel how utterly indescribable it all is, even while trying to describe this unique, unparalleled, unspoiled, astonishing, fascinating, sweet-tempered Japan. After two months spent in their midst, I have to repeat what I ventured to say after two weeks, that nowhere, for the lover of good manners, is there a country so reposeful, so refreshing, so full of antique grace, and soft, fair courtesies as this "Land of the Rising Sun." Only go among them with goodwill and sympathy, and whatever your blunders of deportment and language you will meet here from all ranks of the people a refine- ment of politeness and a charm of intercourse no- where else experienced. I declare I have as yet never seen or heard a Japanese woman do or say anything which fell short of such a high standard of propriety, consideration, and savoir faire as would be expected from a perfect English lady. If you think that is merely my ignorance or preci- pitancy, let me add that I am ubiquitous, and know by this time something of all classes of native society, and can still decisively recommend Japan to any public man weary with the fuss and flurry of Western life as the softest tonic, the surest restorative, the kindest and brightest panacea for too much thought and too long toil. There is not a man, woman, or child within sight who ever heard of the Irish question think only of that! They AT HOME. 335 do not know, or care to know, whence I came, and cannot even pronounce my name, because there is an "L" in it. But because I like them they like me, and there are twenty delightful places where DANCING GIRL. I can any day repair at any hour, sit on the soft white floor, sip tea, smoke, listen to the samisen, and hear my broken Japanese put right from the and kindest of lips and amongst ever- gentlest 336 SEAS AND LANDS. radiant faces. All which, I believe, is called by some the " heathenish East." We assisted a night or two ago at a charming entertainment, where Japanese and European chil- dren were mingled in a fancy-dress dance. The little native maids, in brilliant-coloured kimono and dazzling obi, demurely danced Japanese and Western measures with tiny lads, dressed as daimios and samurais, carrying two swords and grandly apparelled with shoulder-pieces and satin trousers. After the children retired the older ones played at being young, and I saw the German Minister slap his Excellency of the Austrian Empire at the game of " Ring and Rope " with an energy which nothing but abandoned festivity could save from becoming an immediate casus belli, while one Plenipotentiary was obliged to call aloud to his consort, "De la moderation, Madame!" So there is something, as will be seen, for all moods in Tokio. But best of all it is when you are tired of walking up and down the quiet garden, under the bamboos and camellias and are even satisfied with gazing on snow-silvered Fuji- San to stroll down the streets, sparkling with painted lanterns, and casting off your shoes at the spotless threshold of the little house you know in Mikawa Daimachi, to sit on the soft white tatamis, amid a gentle shower of musical salutations, " Ohayos," and " Y6 o ide nasai-mashtas," and drinking the fragrant tea and lighting the tiny kiseru, to listen to the songs AT HOME. $tf of the " Dragon king's daughter," and to dream you are Urashima, who discovered the Fortunate Islands, and stayed there happily for a thousand years. On the wall will hang some picture of the life or teachings of the Buddha, whose compas- sionate peace has passed into the spirit of the land. The clean and shapely brown feet of laugh- ing musumes patter on the floor in willing ser- vice like the coming and going of birds. We fry slices of mochi upon the brazier, and sip, in bright sobriety, the pale yellow tea. A spray of scarlet winter berries, and the last of the yellow chrys- anthemums, suspended in a bamboo joint, give a point of lively colour to the apartment, which is so commodious because it has no doors, and so neat and spotless because we do not make streets of our houses like you at home. When the samisen is not tinkling the sound of light laughter makes sufficient music, for we are kokoro yasui, " heart-easy," and life is never very serious in Japan. Listen a little to the gay, fragmentary love song O Tatsu San is murmuring to the strings which she strikes with the ivory bachi " Sliote wa jodan Xukagora giri de Ima ja tagai no Jitsu to jitsu." Is it something real in her own little existence which renders her brown eyes so soft and expressive as she thus sings ? 33& SEAS AND LANDS. " First 'twas all a jest, Then 'twas daily duty ; Now 'tis at its best, True faith, homely beauty Both quite love-possessed " Was there really ever an " Irish question," you ask yourself, and did we strive ardently against the great Mr. Gladstone upon it? How vain and tedious it all appears now, contrasted with this placid Japanese insouciance ! Mata utatte kudasai! "One more little song, O Tatsu San, and replenish the ' honourable tea ! ' ! At such moments the weary politician might be tempted to say, " Better twenty years of Asia than a cycle of the West ! " TOKIO, Dec. 29, 1889. JAPANESE VILLAGE. CHAPTER XXI. NATURE AND ART. O Tom SAN, plumpest and most cheerful of waiting maids, has just brought in and presented, upon her knees and nose, copies of a Japanese art journal sent me by its editor. This brings to mind that I have had no time as yet to write on the large and attractive subject of Japanese art, hitherto but little understood, notwithstanding the rich collections of bronzes, ivories, porcelain, lacquer-work, carvings, arabesques, embroidery, painted screens, and pictures, which have been many times gathered in London. Japan is, in one sense, a land peopled by artists. Everybody here, from the highest to the lowest, has some trace, at least, of that aesthetic comprehension, indescribable but instinctive, which .makes an art- lover feel at a glance the supreme excellence of the Elgin Marbles, the consummate beauty of the Par- thenon, the grace of Raphael, the strength of Michael Angelo, the sweetness of Beethoven's "Adelaida," the divine tenderness of Chopin's Funeral March. That sort of faculty is, in a certain degree, innate in the Japanese, though their schools and their canons of art differ so widely from those of the West. 339 340 SEAS AND LANDS. Nothing is ugly in the very humblest Japanese home. From the rice-tub to the hairpins, all domestic and personal articles are more or less beautiful and becoming. The Government, shar- ing the national passion for beauty in nature and art, plants seats just at those spots of its public gardens and highways where the view is perfect of Fuji-San or of the sea, or of some MAT-MAKING. range of wooded hills ; and it is common along the by-roads to find official notices telling you where to stop for the best prospect, or how to find the most lovely clump of plum or cherry blossom. In the same spirit the peasant and the artisan, when their wife sets a flowering plant on NATURE AND ART. 341 the Tansu, looks upon it almost in the light of a good meal, and might grudge money for fish or rice, rather than for that. A corresponding artistic genius runs through all their crafts, making their commonest domestic joinery almost like jeweller's work for finish, their mat-making as delicate as silk-weaving, their tubs and pails and buckets as exquisite in design and completeness as ivory work. And the strange thing is that they have the two styles rarely found combined, one of which is char- acterised by this same exquisite finish, while the other is that swift, suggestive impressionism so con- stantly seen in their ordinary drawings and designs. Where they will complete a thing, nothing can be completer ; the microscope itself could find no flaw in the patient, faithful article turned out. When, again, they merely desire to arouse the imagination, one sweep of the brush, one turn of the dexterous wrist, and they have indicated twenty leagues of blue distance, or limned a bird's wing in the very act of beating. This latter manner, also, characterises their national poetry. Bear with one little scrap of it, in order to realise how the Japanese Muse cari trust the quick fancies of her children in the domain of song. A Japanese girl, going to her well in the morning, finds that a convolvulus during the night has twined its crimson and purple bells and green tendrils round the pail. It is too beautiful to disturb ! She abandons the bucket to the fragrant invader, and goes next door to fill her domestic utensils. Out of this simple incident comes a 342 SEAS AND LAND?. famous song, done in three lines and five words. These are " Asagao Tsurube torarete Moral midzu." The literal translation of which is " Convolvulus Bucket taking, I borrow water." And every Japanese ear understands, and every Japanese mind can delight in, the photographic brevity with which the scene and the thought are thus flashed, as it were, into the music and into the heart. But, to convey these to a Western ear and understanding, it would be needful to expand the Japanese poem into at least as many words as the following " The ' Morning-glory ' Her leaves and bells has bound My bucket-handle round. I could not break the bands Of those soft hands. The bucket and the well to her I left : Lend me some water, for I come bereft." And so must all the finer and subtler specimens of Japanese art outside as well as inside its classical poetry be, as it were, translated and expanded for the general Western comprehension. On the screen in my bedroom are two turtles swimming in the sea, wrought upon the flimsiest of paper, with certainly not more than three brushes full of Indian ink. The first brush swept in the NATURE AND ART. 343 forms of the reptiles, and the vague veil of the sea- wave half covering them. The second delineated, by soft half-tints, the mail-plates of their carapaces, their bending flappers, their horny-plated heads, and shadowed bellies. The third, charged with the last and darkest wash, gave, by instantaneous touches, life and motion to the creatures, made the water seem to follow their gliding shells, and the fins appear to fold as their stroke is finished effected, in a word, just enough for the imagination to complete the irresistible suggestion so that there is a picture in it, perpetually delightful, which per- haps occupied three minutes at most of the artist's time. In this kind of triumph the Japanese designer reigns supreme ; but, beyond the familiar region of leaves, flowers, birds, and creatures which have no particular individuality, and which may be there- fore freely generalised, he seems not to perceive, or not to value, the primary element of beauty. As regards the human form, he shows himself in- deed insensible to the real canons of art, albeit this is not for lack of power and observation ; for the statues and figures wrought in wood, and coloured to the life, which I have seen here in the Art School of the University, and also at Yokohama in Mr. Deakin's very rich emporium, are of a finish and force positively without parallel in their kind. It is life itself which the Japanese wood-carver there elicits from his blocks of beech or pine, and they carry out the exactness of the representation, which 344 SEAS AND LANDS. is often of life-size, to a single hair and to a wander- ing blue vein one might almost say to the very pores of the skin. Nor does it matter, to their patient hand and eye, what is the material in which they work. In our sitting-room here, at my side, is a black panel of cherry-tree with a figure upon it, in ivory, of a cock a niwatori, or "garden-bird," as the Japanese call the domestic fowl. The artist evidently had picked up a disregarded thin slice of a tusk, the remnant of some manufactory of knife- handles or hair-brushes, and had asked himself what could be made of it. He saw, in its oval form, the possible delineation of a cock resting on one leg, with his head drawn back into his feathers. He has realised this vision perfectly, cutting, chiselling, scratching his ivory plaque into such admirable veracity of outline, and such precise truth of texture, that the hackles, the wing-primaries, the wattle, the beak and claws, the eyes, the comb, the soft feathers of the tarsi, and the waving plumes of the tail have all of them the appearance of nature itself although the plate of ivory was not bigger than the top of a hat, to begin with. Yet, either because the type of Japanese feminine beauty is petite and little varied, or because its really gracious and refined points have never been studied artistically, or have been studiously despised and disregarded, no Japanese painter or carver can make half as pretty and graceful a female face and figure as he, or any- body, may see in a day's walk about Tokio or Kioto., This may be partly due to the only half- NATURE AND ART. 345 concealed subordination and disesteem in which the sex is here held, speaking nationally. Nobody is, indeed, ever brutal to a woman in Japan, as in Europe. She has nowhere and never to fear cruelty, violence, or even harsh words. But her status is traditionally inferior, and she lives a semi- slave in too many cases vastly superior though she is in physical and mental type to the masculine por- tion of the population ; and, all things considered, perhaps naturally the most refined, the most gentle, the best-mannered, the most modest, and most self- respecting woman, after her own fashion, in the whole world ; and, in a placid and unemotional way, the most grateful for deference and attention, and the most attached and faijthful in return for affection. Strange, in truth, it must seem that this graceful and fairy-like fellow-countrywoman has never inspired Japanese artists with the ideal of human beauty latent in her special charms. They can see beauty, too, everywhere else. Round this house run broad unpainted planks of fir, fixed to strengthen the outside amemados, or rain-shutters. To give them ornament and lightness, the builder has set a craftsman to cut stencilled ducks and pheasants out of the blank face of the wood. Nor is it possible to exaggerate the skill and spirit with which he has put his fret-saw into the plank, and by a cut or two here and there, through which the external light passes, created the most fantastic and amusing groups of wild-fowl in flight, or gulls and terns floating upon water, or of pheasants and other 346 SEAS AND LANDS. birds passing through the air. Who else could thus saw a hole in a fir-slab which should look so like the outline in silver of a wild goose on the wing, that a sportsman might almost swear to the breed and the colour? With regard to the wonderful lacquer-work in which Japan stands unrivalled, an American chemist Mr. Hitchcock has recently explained the pro- cess, after close study : "Lacquer comes from a tree called Mhus Vernicifera, which grows throughout the main island of Japan, but principally around Kioto. The juice, from which lacquer is obtained, exudes from cuts in the bark, and is collected from May to October. It issues slowly, and is collected with a pointed instrument, and transferred to a wooden vessel. A dozen trees are cut in several places in rapid succession, and the juice gathered from time to time. During the season each tree is requisitioned about twenty times. As the sap first exudes it is a greyish, thick or viscous fluid, which quickly turns to yellow, and afterwards to black, when it comes in contact with the air. It is strained through a cotton cloth to free it from wood and dirt, after being thoroughly stirred to render it of uniform consistency. A portion of the raw lacquer is then poured into a large circular vessel, and vigorously stirred with a long-handled implement for five or six hours, while the heat of a small charcoal furnace is thrown on the surface to evaporate the water. During the stirring certain ingredients are added. Iron produces the fine black lustre ; in Tokio a soluble salt of iron being employed for this purpose, in Osaka iron dust. The lacquer is then poured into a vessel to settle, and is afterwards drawn off. The wood used is a variety of fir, known as hinolci. For common work it is covered with paper, but in better qualities the wood itself is the surface, being first carefully smoothed and all joints filled up with the raw lacquer mixed with rice paste, which soon hardens so that it can scarcely be marked with a knife. The whole is then covered with a mixture of inferior lacquer, and coarse, gritty powder, and left a few days to dry, after which it is placed in a moist atmosphere to harden. A hard, tenacious surface is thus obtained for the next coat. The next process is to cover NATURE AND ART. . 347 the wood with two even layers of lacquer mixed with a fine ochre powder, so as to get a perfect smooth-grained surface for the sub- sequent work. This is rubbed down with a stone, and the parts which are not to receive any decoration are ready for the finishing applications of the lacquer. The other portions are covered with two coats of black lacquer ; the first, applied with a broad brush, dries with a brilliant, reflecting surface ; when this is quite hard the second coat is applied, and on this the designs are impressed. In Wakasa ware there is no painting or drawing ; the white decora- tion is made by scattering egg-shell powder skilfully by hand here and there, and other designs are produced by pressing various leaves on the surface. To get the surface completely smooth again is the next operation, and then a transparent lacquer, coloured yellow, is applied with the object of furnishing a yellow ground for the gold which is to be laid on. This is covered by successive coats of the same lacquer until a smooth surface is again obtained, beneath which are the gold and decorations. Lacquer gives a much harder surface to wood than the best varnish, and is not brittle. It takes a polish lustrous as marble, and lasting for centuries ; it is proof against boiling water, alcohol, and would probably make the very best coating for the bottoms of sea-going vessels, if the process could be cheaply applied. The objection is the danger of lacquer-poisoning from the fresh material, which is justly dreaded by the Japanese." I should be inclined to declare the supremacy of Japanese art most assured in wood, ivory, and panel carving. Certainly there is nothing known to me in Europe, from the masterpieces of Grin- ling Gibbons down to the best things in modern churches and mansions, to come near what superior Japanese workmen can achieve. Their ivory Net- sukis are well enough known, but you must still come to Japan to see the best and finest. These little articles cut out of any scrap of elephant tusk on hand are used as toggles or studs where- with to suspend from the girdle the purse, the 348 . SEAS AND LANDS. tobacco - pipe, or the doctor's case of medicines. With incredible patience, with instinctive skill, and nicest observation of Nature, the craftsman not only produces by manual use of the file, graver, and drill, the perfect if grotesque object intended, and finishes it off in all its hidden corners, with a scrupulous conscientiousness, but obtains also by dexterous superficial lines and marks, the exact texture of the skin, or hair, or feather to be indicated. One of the larger specimens recently shown to me represented a bag of rice with two or three dozen rats in and upon it. Every rat was as individual in character, position, and action, as if a special portrait had been taken of him ; and the web of the bag, the glistening grains of rice, and the sleek fur of the rodents could not have been 'better expressed in painting. Again, at the Art School of the University I spent a morning lately in one of the rooms, where twenty or thirty advanced students were carving for practice, and for the purposes of a lecture, upon slabs of simple white fir-wood. Tii no other part of the world could such natural dexterity, precise observa- tion, and consummate command of the chisel have been witnessed. Seated on the ground, and using no mallet, but merely driving with hand and palm sharp-edged gravers and gouges, these men seemed to treat the wood as if it were clay. Under their touch delicate and delicious pictures arose, in low relief, of bamboo sprays, of the rising moon, of flights of wild-fowl over lakes and rice-fields, of NATURE AND ART. 349 blossoming plum-groves, and cherry-gardens, and lotus-pools, and of Fuji-San soaring, beautiful and majestic, from her girdle of clouds. And these marvellous specimens were being executed in the commonest material, and merely as a kind of college exercise ! To see the very choicest and rarest of such examples of the wonderful art-crafts of Japan, one must live in the country and inspect not only the articles shown in the best curio shops, but the private heirlooms in the houses of the nobles, and the treasures of the temples. For the passing traveller who wishes to carry off with him trophies of his stay in Japan, there is an admirable and well-known art store on the Bund at Yokohama. Whoever will pay the necessary price for really good things, chosen by the experience and judg- ment acquired during many years, will find them in this collection, which has no rival anywhere in this country. It employs directly many of the best native artists, and has agents always travelling in out of the way places, where relics of the highest ancient art may still be picked up. There is, conse- quently, no better spot where a knowledge of the range and variety of Japanese art old and new may be so soon and pleasantly acquired. Practi- cally, everything is to be found there, from the rare and precious real Satsuma the delight of connoisseurs to Awata and all the other marks, some of it ancient, and some, even more beautiful, of modern work, to the delicious little sword-hilts 350 SEAS AND LANDS. and scabbard-plates, where whole legends are de- picted in delicate gold upon bronze, rendered even more precious than gold, by deft artistry. The tourist or collector will see there, without any trouble, matchless Cloisonne work by that prince of designers, Namikawa of Tokio, whose tender grey and rose-hued tints prove him a master of the science of colour, and by other makers hardly inferior, who know how to employ to the utmost advantage the newly invented and dazzling gold- stone, producing with it and the rest of their rich palette effects superior almost to jewellery or to Jeypore enamel. I was shown last week at Messrs. Deakin's house two spherical vases of Cloisonne, made to the order of Count dei Bardi, of Venice. The Count had given 1000 guineas for the pair, and they were worth it ; for never, I think, did human hand create objects of such quiet, but satisfying beauty, of such marvellous finesse of toil, yet pro- ducing such broad and splendid and harmonious results. Each of these exquisite vessels presented a perfect feast of colour from surfaces finished in every point like the petal of a lily leaf, but full of a thousand different and delicate creations of fancy, and of alternately bold and tender contrasts of tint. The whole process of Cloisonne work may be studied on the premises, and not until the patient, skilful artist has been observed at his labours is it possible to realise the vast amount of faithful mani- pulation entailed in the creation of these lovely pieces. NATURE AND ART. 351 First, there comes the difficult task of beating out the copper sheets to the required form for the founda- tion. Next the artist has to trace on its face the intricate design of flower, bird, or landscape ; then the piece is passed on to another department, where for weeks, months, or years supple fingers are en- gaged in fixing over the sketched design the minute bits of wire that go to make the metallic partitions for the reception of the enamels, and not until it has been "filled" five times, and has entered the kiln as often, does the article reach the polisher, and from his hands pass to the showroom. Speci- mens of Cloisonne work, forty, fifty, or sixty years old, tell how great has been Japan's advance of late in this section of her art industry. Then the finished article was dull, leaden in colouring, in- distinct in design ; now it is bright, chaste, and supremely beautiful. At the art store on the Bund of Yokohama you will see and covet ivory carvings of ancient or modern imagination, lacquered work in red and black, glorious inlaid panels in gold and silver and mother-of-pearl, antique and recent weapons and utensils, bronzes ranging in value from fifty cents to five thousand dollars, magnificent cabinets, boxes, and tables enriched with fantastic designs in gold and powdered egg-shell these and countless other treasures attract the attention. I was shown a folding screen, destined, like the lovely vases, for Italy, on which five special crafts- men had laboured incessantly during six years, using up, not only all that time and all their skill, 352 SEAS AND LANDS. but nearly six thousand dollars' worth, besides, of gold, silver, pearl, shell, ivory, jewels, and the finest lacquer. It portrayed how Yamatodake tempted the dragon to drink sake, and how he killed the great beast in order that he might himself win the lovely daughter of the Sun-Goddess in marriage ; and it was altogether such a magnificent work as could in no other country save Japan be seen or produced. Then there are to be studied and admired dazzling brocades and silken kakemono; strange old temple lamps which have lighted the devotions of numberless dead generations of Bud- dhists ; bronze shrines, and bronze Dai-Butsus, among the last of which I saw an image presented by the Shogun Yoritomo to the Kiu Shogi Temple in commemoration of his victory over Hidekesa. At this really wonderful emporium one may examine, as nowhere else, the Tsuba or sword- guards, the Fuchi- Kashira or scabbard ornaments, splendid and precious sword-blades, Kiserus, pipes in gold and silver which have soothed the lips of old feudalistic lords and ladies, vases of rock-crystal and jade, marvels of cutting ; and quaint-looking dragons, in silver, bronze, and ivory, with scales that bend, movable jaws, and jewelled eyes. I lately examined a piece of wood-carving, of abso- lutely matchless excellence in spirit and execu- tion, representing two life-sized wrestlers struggling in the ring the whole work cut and coloured to nature, every muscle and every vein delineated, every tendon and ligament anatomically perfect, a triumph NATURE AND ART. 353 of faithful study and minute observation. " Such cunning those that live on high have given to the Jap ! " You will see this astonishing achievement of wood-carving in London, I think. Before it quitted the emporium it drew a constant crowd, and the sea-front of the premises had to be curtained off at last. During the display a rather amusing incident occurred. A policeman informed the pro- prietor that, if he intended to continue the wrestling on his premises, it was necessary that he should engage a posse of policemen to restrain the crowd. He was invited into the store, and melted into official smiles when he saw that the wrestlers were carvings in wood. He muttered naruhodo, and left. Briefly, there is no place in Japan to be so decisively recommended to the student of Japanese art with limited time at his disposal as the collection to which I am referring on the Bund at Yokohama, especially if he has taken the " curio fever," a dangerous malady, too well known to globe-trotters visiting Japan. It has been rightly written " You don't ' shop ' in this country. Shopping implies premedi- tation, and premeditation is in vain in Japan. If you know what you want your knowledge is set aside in a moment, in the twink- ling of an eye, and your purchases gratify anticipations that you never had, to be paradoxical And you never fully know the joy of buying until you buy in Japan. Life condenses itself into one long desire, keener and more intense than any want you ever had before the desire of paying and possessing. The loftiest aims are swallowed up in this ; the sternest scientist, or political econo- mist, or social theorist that was ever set ashore at Yokohama straightway loses life's chief end among the curios, and it is at least six weeks before he finds it again. And as to the ordinary Z 354 SEAS AND LANDS. individual, without the guidance of superior aims, time is DO more for him, nor things temporal ; he is lost in contemplation of the ancient and the beautiful in the art of Nippon, and though he sell his boots and pawn his grandfather's watch he will carry it off with him to the extent of his uttermost farthing." I have mentioned before that this is to be a most important spring-time for our capital. His Excel- lency the British Minister having just notified the Government that their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Connaught are expected to arrive in Japan shortly, arrangements for their reception are in progress. The Enryokwan Palace will be placed at their disposal. Furthermore, the official notices are out regulating the first elections to the new Parliament, which will meet at the end of May. This and the working of the new constitution is a tremendous experiment for Japan, and one which may not be initiated without some trouble. But I, for one, have faith in the future of this fair and friendly Empire. IMAI-CHO, Jan. 20, 1890, A TEMPLE GATE. CHAPTER XXII. COURT AND COMMERCE. As one learns more and more of the language, and so approaches a little nearer to the thoughts and hearts of this people, he becomes aware that almost all the books previously perused about Japan were in a great degree superficial, and that he is in a new world, life in which is almost as strange and different as would be existence in the moon. The very plum-trees are peculiar. They have learnt some floral secret by which their blossoms entirely disregard the sharp frosts of the January nights, so as to appear in sudden and splendid beauty with these first days of February. Not only in our own garden, but on every lane and hillside, this great green city has suddenly become lovely with silver and crimson plum-flowers covering the heretofore bare branches of the trees, and filling the prospect with grace and the atmosphere with fragrance. One spot in the city, at Kameido, is now. or will soon be, a special resort, because of the Gwa-Rio- Bai or " sleeping-dragon plum-trees," which are to be seen in a large orchard near at hand. There 500 ancient trees covered with flowers have been trained to creep along the ground, forming thickets 358 SEAS AND LANDS. of delicious bloom ; while stanzas of poetry in praise of their perfume and glory are cut upon the stone pillars round about, or written upon slips of gold paper. At the gate are sold boxes of dried and salted plums, called ume-boshi. And the pleasant people are, like their pretty plum-trees, perpetually disclosing ways and habits wholly different from those of the West. With other moralities, other virtues, other failings, other ob- jects of effort and avoidance, other estimates of good and evil, other notions of life and love and death from those which are part of our being, they are a race alone and uncomprehended. One would almost say that the land and the trees and the people were made for each other they are all so unique, unexpected, and original. The passion of the commonest citizens and peasants for the jewellery which Nature now hangs for them upon the hillsides and gardens is but one among their distinguishing characteristics. Everybody has a little dwarf plum-tree, covered with white or rosy blossoms, honoured like a household god, in his hut or shop ; and flower-barrows everywhere per- ambulate the city, drawn by humble professors of floral aesthetics, who make a fine art of dressing and disposing their beautiful wares. But I must leave the absorbing topic of Japanese thoughts and ways for a future occasion in order to speak of two or three important social functions at which we have lately assisted in the capital. Count Yamagata, the present Prime Minister and head of COURT AND COMMERCE. 359 the Government, gave last week a magnificent ball, in the public building known as the " Hall of the Cry of the Stag." The occasion was favourable to study a fashionable function of the "Upper Ten" in Tokio, for the Count had invited more than 1200 guests, of whom about seventy or eighty were Europeans. Outside the building all was gay and bright with innumerable crimson lanterns swinging in festoons from tree to tree and along the walls and gateways. Endless strings of jinrikishas dash up the broad paths and deliver their consignments of ladies in ball costume and dazzlingly decorated Japanese officers at the entrance; for the "kuruma" is almost the universal vehicle, and comparatively few carriages frequent the narrow streets of the capital. Nobody could outdo the Japanese in the adorn- ment of interior and exterior with foliage and flowers, and we pass through a forest of palm and bamboo and fir branches to the broad staircase, at the head of which the Count-Premier, glittering with all the orders known to the Empire, stands with his Countess, in European robe of white satin and gold, to receive the guests. The almost general adoption of Western modes makes the ballroom less striking to a European eye than the picturesque grounds, where the crowds of jinrikishas and cream-coloured Chinese ponies so little resemble anything in Eng- land. Dancing goes on with spirit, always after the Continental fashion, and the Japanese take part in lancers and mazurkas with very great solemnity 360 SEAS AND LANDS. the officers especially performing every figure as carefully as though it were some military manoeuvre. They wear the insignia of the " Rising Sun " in rose and white, the Chrysanthemum in yellow, and the "Coast Defence" in green, making a brave show but, alas ! if only the Japanese ladies understood how far more graceful their petite forms would look in their own native dress ! The few kimono worn in the brilliant throng by Japanese dames and damsels, too patriotic or sensible to mask their graces in Western skirts and bodices, serve to show what a mistake it has been to decree this change in national habits, which, however, does not descend very deep. In the streets the national garb is still practically universal, and even these Court ladies, when they get home, will hasten to throw aside their importations from Paris and London, to gird their own soft and sober silks and crapes round their slender waists with the bright obi, and to remove from their cramped little feet the pointed satin shoes. Almost all the Ministers of State were present at this entertainment, as well as two or three of the Imperial Princes, and of course the ladies and gentlemen of the various legations. At a second grand ball given by Count Saigon, the Minister of Marine, at his yashiki in Nagata Cho, a similar spectacle was presented ; but one wondered whether the Japanese really enjoyed the foreign style of entertainment as much as their own graceful and easy banquets, where the dancing is Oriental and sake cups replace the sparkling goblets of champagne. COURT AND COMMERCE. 363 Count Ito, one of the most famous of modern Japanese statesmen, was not present on either of these great occasions, being in Opposition, and absent at his country seat near Odawara, a little town on the sea-shore close to the foot of Fuji-San. I received, however, the honour of a special invita- tion to visit the author of the new Japanese Consti- tution, and went down to Odawara a few days ago to dine with the chief founder of modern Japan. Count Ito's country house stands on the sea-shore under the great volcanic hills of which Fuji-San is the queen, and there was only a large bamboo cage or aviary of storks between our dining-room and the wavelets of the sleeping Pacific. We passed a memorable afternoon, made short by pleasant con- versation about European and native statesmen and the past and future of Japan, the amiable Countess presiding at the table set after the European fashion having near her her little son and daughter. But behind all these quiet present times and scenes in Japanese political life is a dark bygone background of stormy days and stirring deeds, which lends to the present generation of Japanese statesmen a curious interest. To take, for example, merely those three Ministers whose names I have just mentioned. Count Yamagata, the President of the Cabinet a fine, tall, soldierly man, of high-bred look and bearing, as becomes a nobleman of his origin held a command in the army of the Mikado, which at last overthrew the Shogunate, and laid the foundation of that great Restoration in which the 364 SEAS AND LANDS. present system is built. We should have to go back to the Duke of Wellington to find a statesman in our own records who has thus mingled war with civil affairs in the experiences of a short quarter of a century. Then, again, as to Count Saigon, the Japanese First Lord of the Admiralty in the present Ad- ministration. He, too, took part in the fierce strife which arose between the partisans of the Shogun and the loyalists who were for re-establish- ing the ancient regime, and in that contest it was his ill-fate to be forced to encounter his own dearly loved brother, who had taken up arms on the other side. The rebels, or Shogunites, were defeated, and the head of his brother was brought, neatly washed and packed in a silk bag, as a present of honour, joy, and victory. Imagine such a recollection for Lord George Hamilton or Mr. W. H. Smith. Lastly, I spoke of my visit to Count Ito, and mentioned how I sate at table with the ex-Premier and his wife and children. The Countess quiet, gentle, motherly, and wearing spectacles, carving the tai and the kamo with such a matronly serenity had yet a history of romance and devotion which could make the wildest fictionist's fortune. Long ago, in those dark and bloody days when the Minister was her lover, and a fugitive from his enemies, there came a time when they had tracked him to her house, and had chosen a band of soshis to assassinate him. The noise of their clogs and the rattling of their scabbards were heard ; and the Count, trapped COURT AND COMMERCE. 365 like the royal stag in his mountain pleasaunce, drew his Bizen blade and prepared to die, as a Japanese lord should, amid a circle of dead foes. But while he murmured " Sayonara ! " and knitted his fingers round the sharkskin hilt of his sword, that brave lady, whose guest I was, whispered, " Do not die ; there is a hope still," upon which she removed the hibachi, or fire-box, over which they were sitting, and, lifting up the matting and the planks beneath, induced her lover to conceal himself in the hollow space which exists under the floor of all Japanese houses. The murderers broke into the room, a ferocious band, just as the fire-box had been re- placed, and the Countess had assumed a position of nonchalance. They demanded their victim ; and when she protested against their intrusion, and bade them search if they wanted Ito, the wretches dragged her about -the apartment by her long, beautiful black hair now touched with silver and grievously mal- treated her, but could not shake her resolute fidelity. Thanks to this, Count Ito, the hero of many another strange adventure, escaped from the chief peril of his career, and has lived to give his country a new Constitution and to be one of the foremost and best-reputed statesmen of modern Japan. But I must break off from politics and other topics of pressing interest, to draw the attention of your public and of European exhibitors generally to a forthcoming occasion, not sufficiently estimated, as I believe, by men of business in England and elsewhere, as regards its possibilities for increasing 366 SEAS AND LANDS. the trade between your capital and ours. Japan is about to hold a great national exhibition in Tokio, by far the largest and boldest of its kind ever contemplated here, and all the provinces will, for months after the inauguration, send the inhabi- tants of the Empire in flocks to see the exhibits. Now Japan has a population equal to that of France, with incalculable powers of development and inexhaustible natural resources, so that I think I can do no better service, in the conclusion of this letter, than to derive from an authoritative source the fullest particulars available about this notable undertaking, in the desire that your merchants and exporters may be enabled to take part in good time in what ought to prove the opening of a new epoch of commerce and exchange between Japan and the West. Here, then, are the particulars, which I take from the best quarter open to me. Five years ago the Japanese Government announced that a national industrial exhibition should be held in Tokio in 1890. Two similar exhibitions had already taken place the first in 1877, and the second in 1881 and their success, from a financial point of view, had seemed sufficient to justify a renewal of the experiment at regular intervals. But after the Exhibition of 1881 the authorities hesitated. The problem to be dealt with was not purely industrial and commercial ; it was also artistic ; and in Japan's economical outlook art occupies a prominent place. It has long come to be recognised by her leading COURT AND COMMERCE. 367 men, that to attract the world's custom, her best resource lies in her art. Tea, silk, rice, may stand at the head of her staples of export, but not to these is due the magnetic attraction which she exercises upon Western peoples or the place she has won in their esteem. The true secret of the interest she excites must be sought in the unique artistic capa- cities with which Nature has dowered her inhabi- tants. A nation of. artists, their admirable instinct, by centuries of exercise amidst highly favourable conditions, has found expression even in their phy- sical versatility. The commonest carpenter plies his adze with hands that can guide the sculptor's chisel, and the hewer of stone will at any moment exchange his mallet for the brush of the decorative designer. In the application of these gifts to her manufactures. Japan sees her highest hope of wealth and distinction. But for a time the successful em- ployment of her unique talents was interrupted by a special influence. After the centralisation of the Government, in 1867, the leisurely independence and easily earned competence of feudal days became things of the past. Until that time artists, secured against "chilling poverty" by the munificent pat- ronage of feudal barons, worked for the sake of their art, not for the sake of what it might bring them. Time and money scarcely concerned them ; at whatever cost of either, their object was achieved, and achievement sufficed. But when feudalism fell these favourable conditions disappeared altogether. The feudal barons, divested of their revenues and 368 SEAS AND LANDS. authority, had to turn from patronising art to the humbler occupation of making both ends meet, and the newly established Government found its time and resources entirely monopolised by affairs of State. So it fell out that nothing but the foreign market stood between the Japanese artist and star- vation. Stern necessity bade him adapt his work to Western taste not Western taste as expressed in the then nascent revolt against an era of tawdri- ness and vulgarity, but Western taste as inter- preted by the commercial traveller, the merchant skipper, and the shopkeeper. If under such cir- cumstances he consented to a temporary sacrifice of his better instincts, some excuse may be found for him in the fact that the nation's mood for the moment was to sit at the feet of the new and marvellous West in everything. When states- men were borrowing their politics and jurisprudence from abroad, students their science and philosophy, manufacturers their capital and machinery, it did not, perhaps, appear incongruous or improper that artists should derive standards of taste from the same source. Many penitential years must elapse before, the false impression this period produced in Europe and America can be effaced, and before its evil effects on the Japanese themselves can be entirely corrected. The dark age culminated in 1881, and its worst fruits were exposed to public gaze at the exhibition in that year. Everyday folks, indeed, did not bestow much thought on the COURT AND COMMERCE. 369 matter. Men came and went, carelessly admiring the motley host of ornamental objects collected within the building in Uyeno Park, and thinking little of the disquieting augury that was to be drawn from such a meretricious profusion of decorative gaud, such glaring untruthfulness to the canons of true and pure Japanese art. Happily, however, there were some who realised the sadness of seeing a nation break away from all that is beautiful in its traditions, and some, also, who understood that the path upon which Japan had then entered could lead only to decay and disgrace. A reaction speedily set in. Few at first, but resolute and confident, the reformers set themselves to recall Japan to her proper senses. They did not find her bigoted in error. Her artists were willing enough to be led back into the paths from which they had strayed reluctantly, and the powerful aid of the Government was not wanting to foster the Renaissance. Of the measures adopted it will be sufficient to say that periodical exhibitions on a small scale, under the auspices of art associations, industrial societies, and local governments, played an important part. By their aid standards were re-established and popu- larised, and a genuine perception of the nature and importance of the problem to be grappled with was disseminated among the people. The results will be seen at the exhibition of the present year. It would be too much to assert that Japan can then completely re-establish her individuality : some traces of the evil leaven must naturally be- still apparent. 2 A 37 o SEAS AND LANDS. But there can be no question that we are about to witness an unprecedented display of beautiful and characteristic works of national art. If some speci- mens unworthy of the revival figure among the ex- hibits, their presence will be more than compensated for by the companionship of nobler specimens illus- trating the remarkable progress made by Japanese art industry during the past seven or eight years. The enameller, the embroiderer, the potter, the worker in wood and metal, the lacquerer, and the weaver will all demonstrate that if in some direc- tions they cannot yet rival the technical skill of their ancestors, in others they can and do surpass it. The exhibition is to be inaugurated on April ist, and will probably remain open for six months, though at present July 3ist is spoken of as the closing day. For five years the people have been preparing ; and the authorities, on their side, sensible that a great effort is to be made by the nation, are acting up to the occasion. The appropriation from the Treasury on account of the first exhibition was $100,000; that for the second, $180,000; whereas for the third half a million has been set aside. The buildings cover an area of eight acres, and to pass in front of each stall only once the visitor will have to walk sixteen miles. No needless expense has been incurred in connection with the edifice. It is a plain wooden structure, spacious and conveniently planned, but neither attractive nor imposing. It stands, however, in a park of exquisite natural beauty, and during' the three weeks immediately COURT AND COMMERCE. 371 following its opening the whole neighbourhood will be alight with the glory of the cherry blossoms. Already space has been demanded for 160,000 ex- hibits more than twice the total number displayed at the exhibition of 1881 and among them are many masterpieces, such as a generation produces only once in its lifetime, and such as can only be seen at all in a country where the skilled work of a highly gifted art artisan commands less than the wage of a London dock labourer. In addition to the exhibition proper, a commanding attraction is promised in the shape of a museum of ancient art objects. These will be displayed in a separate building, permanently devoted to such purposes, which stands within a furlong of the main edifice. Choice specimens from the imperial collection are to constitute the nucleus of this museum, and the boundless treasures of private collections will also be freely placed at the disposal of the committee. The Government have decided to issue 1000 compli- mentary tickets to persons of note in Europe and America, as well as in Japan. These tickets will not only secure free admission to the exhibition, but will also entitle their holders to special facilities of travel by railway and steamer within Japanese territory. Accommodation in Tokio will also be ample, for a large new hotel is just approaching completion. Centrally situated, it contains sixty suites of rooms, and will have a cuisine and cellar of the best. Japan, always an enchanting bourne for the tourist, offers temptations this year that 372 SEAS AND LANDS. should attract every lover of art and of its best products, while it cannot but prove a remarkable opportunity for those interested in the intercourse between Japan and England to initiate new mutual wants and to prepare to supply them. AZABU, TOKIO, Feb. 4, 1890. THE MUSUME. 'AND ON HER HEAD A HOOD OF BLUE.' CHAPTER XXII 1. THE JAPANESE HEARTH. I DO not remember that anybody has ever yet, in describing Japan, done any sort of sufficient justice to the immense and important part borne by the hibachi in the domestic life of this people. Tourists, travellers, and correspondents casually, indeed, men- tion the article, as something special to Japan, but forget to say how the entire existence of the Japanese centres in this very peculiar little insti- tution. The hibachi is a fire-box, of which the simplest form is that of a square, or circular, or oblong receptacle of wood lined with sheet-copper. Into this a quantity of lime-dust, or sifted ashes, is put, and on the top of that a little pile of lighted charcoal, which burns slowly and steadily upon the fine ashes, giving out heat, but not a vestige of smoke. This is the primitive and plainest form of the " fire-box," such as will be seen in use for common purposes, at railway stations, in Kuruma-sheds, in wayside tea-houses and restaurants, and in unpretentious shops. But Japanese skill and taste love to lavish themselves on this central piece of domestic furniture, and you see hibachis, accordingly, of all forms and 375 376 SEAS AND LANDS. materials. Some are made of hammered copper, or brass, or iron, with patterns delicately and beautifully beaten out of the burnished metal. Some I have seen in great houses contrived from the root of a vast tree, the gnarled and knotted timber being laboriously hollowed out and lined with copper, and the exterior carefully polished to bring forth the beauty of the grain. These fantastic " fire-boxes " are in much vogue for country villas and smoking-rooms. The hibachi for daily home service must be useful before all things, and the general shape of it is, as I have said, that of an oblong box, about two feet in length by fourteen inches broad and a foot deep. Two-thirds of the length of this structure is occupied by the fire-box proper, lined with metal, and laid with carefully sifted ashes, upon which glows the little nest of red sumi-sticks. Upon the top of that will be placed a four-legged frame of iron, which supports the bronze kettle, the teapot, and, at need, a small gridiron of wire, or a glazed frying-pan in which fish are stewed or fried, or else the earthen dish whereupon the inmates roast their bean -cakes, or the slices of daikon. The remainder of the hibachi is made up of clever little drawers, and unsuspected com- partments, where the lady of the house whose special possession the "fire-box" is keeps a world of things which profit by being dry, her biscuits, her paper for accounts, needles and thread, kanzdshis, combs, tea, chop-sticks, and what not. THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 377 Thus this piece of furniture is at one and the same moment the household hearth, the larder, the work-box, the writing-case, the toilette-stand, the kitchen, and the natural centre for the family GIRL OF THE TOSHIWARA. of conversation, employment, and needlework. But it may combine these with ever so much beauty and richness of external decoration, and it is 378 SEAS AND LANDS. common to see the hibachi built of very beautiful striped and variegated woods, its drawers and com- partments delicately adorned with chased handles and plaques of silvered or bronzed metal, while neat little mats of plaited grass or embroidered velvet are laid upon the highly honourable part where the teapot of porcelain and the pretty small painted tea-cups usually stand. Sometimes a table for writing and working is ingeniously blended with the other conveniences, and there is one special form of hibachi, used for imparting heat in cold weather, which is closed in with a lattice of light woodwork all round. You can cover this over with futons, or bed-rugs, and warm the hands and feet in the confined glow, or, on frosty nights, you can put it boldly and bodily under the bed-clothes, and derive from it all the advantage of a permanent warming-pan. Then there is the tobacco-mono, another special form of the hibachi, but entirely devoted to the eternal kiseru, the small pipe of brass and bamboo in which the Japanese perpetually indulge. This is a kind of smaller fire-box, with a bed of ashes for the ever- glowing charcoal, a couple of drawers for the delicately cut fragrant tobacco, and a little com- partment where the brass and silver tipped pipes repose while not in use. There is a cover, with an opening, for the charcoal, and a handle by which the tobacco-mono is carried about ; for it accompanies the owner everywhere to bed, to breakfast, to dinner on all occasions ; and next THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 379 to the sliding of the shoji, the most universal sound heard, perhaps, in Japan, is the tapping of the little kiseru on the edge of the tobacco-box, when, for the hundredth time during the day, the little pipe has been filled, and lighted, and the AT THE TOSHIWABA. one full puff " ippuku " taken, which satisfies the refined and delicate desires of the Nippon smoker. You must realise then, or try to realise, the 380 SEAS AND LANDS. prodigious import and positive universality of the domestic " fire-box " in Japan. There must exist at least as many as the inhabitants of the country that is to say, about 40,000,000. Every shop has one in front of its shelves and bales, and every tea- house or hotel keeps them by scores, because the first thing brought to a traveller, or customer, on arrival, is the hibachi, either to warm him, or to furnish a chronic light for his pipe, or simply from habit and hospitality. The tradesman and those who come to buy at his shop gather over the bronze fire-box to discuss prices ; and at a dinner party a hibachi is placed between every pair of guests. In the interior of an ordinary Japanese home, however, one sees the national institution in its simplest use. There it stands, always lighted, at least during the autumn and winter months, and in its copper re- ceptacle the bed of ashes, and the glowing nest of genial fire. It is good to see with what dainty care the Japanese dame will pick up, stick by stick, and fragment by fragment, the precious pieces of char- coal which have fallen from off the central fire ! With what delicate skill she builds a little dome or peak over the tiny crater of the domestic volcano, arranging and distributing ! With what silent in- terest everybody watches her purse up her lips, and gently but persistently blow upon the sleeping fire, till the scarlet life of it creeps from the central spark into every grey and black bit of the heap, and the hibachi is once more in high activity ! Then the hands of the household meet over the kindly THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 381 warmth, for this is the only "hearth" of the domi- cile, and when the palms and wrists are warm all the body will be comfortable. There are little square cushions laid all round the fire-box, and upon this we kneel and chat. You must drop nothing into that sacred centre in the way of cigar-ends, stumps of matches, or cigarette-paper ; it is the Vestal Fire, not to be violated by disrespectful fuel. But you INN-SEKVANTS. may put the tetsubin on it, and boil the " honourable hot water," or fry peas over it, or cook little fishes, or stew slices of orange and persimmon, and in fact treat it as a supplementary kitchen to the larger and permanent hearth established in the daidokoro. Every now and then the mistress of the house, who has the seat of honour before it, controlling the 382 SEAS AND LANDS. supply of sumi and the brass hashi, with which the fire-box is tended, will delicately and economically pick out with them, from the small basket at her side, a nodule or two more of the charcoal, and place these on the sinking fire, treating her sumi- hako, or charcoal- store, as elegantly and sparingly as a London lady would the sugar-basin. Confess that it is a mark of the refined national life of this people, that they have thus for their family hearth-stove a pretty piece of cabinet-work lined with copper, and for their coal-cellar a tiny flower-basket filled with a handful of clean and picked charcoal ! You might place the entire affair on the toilette table of a duchess, and not spoil or soil one lappet of her laces, or leave one speck of dust upon her mirrors and her dressing-bags. Japan in her social aspects is already, in truth, half understood when the universal use and the graceful utility of the hibachi have thoroughly become comprehended. One happy consequence of this omnipresent employment of charcoal for domestic and culinary purposes is that Japanese cities, villages, and abodes are perfectly free from smoke. The clear air is always unpolluted by those clouds of defacing and degrading black smuts which blot out our rare sunshine in London, and help to create its horrible fogs. There is no doubt a peril of a special kind in the fire-box. If not supplied from the kitchen hearth with glowing coals already past their first firing, there will be a constant efflux of carbonic acid gas into the room, which will kill THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 383 you, subtly and slowly, as certainly as an over- dose of opium. In European apartments this would prove a very serious danger, but the shdji and sliding doors of wood let in so many little sources of ventilation and the rats, moreover, A JAPAN K8E LADY. take care to gnaw so many holes in the paper of the mado that the fatal gas becomes dispelled or diluted as fast as it is created. Nevertheless accidents occur, especially in bath-rooms where 384 SEAS AND LANDS. the June, or great tub, is heated by a large mass of raw charcoal, and there was a case a week a<*o o in Yokohama of a sea-captain found dead in the fwro-do of his hotel. The Japanese are too wise to sleep with a large hibachi in their apartments. They know well that the deadly gas, being heavy, sinks to the bottom of the room, where their futdns are spread upon the mats ; and they either put the fire-box outside, or are careful to see that it has " honourable mature charcoal " burning low in it. I imagine that the use of sumi, so cleanly and so elegant, is of comparatively modern date in Japan. In old days it seems that the people burned wood, and perhaps even coal, just as they got both from their forests and mines. Lately I came upon a legend in Japanese history concerning the very ancient Mikado Nintoku, which appears to con- firm and illustrate this, and since I was sufficiently struck by the anecdote to put it into verse, I will conclude these superficial remarks upon the family fires of Japanese domiciles by appending the little story THE EMPEROR'S BREAKFAST. Fifteen centuries ago Emperor Nintok of Japan Walked upon his roof at daybreak, Watching if the toils began Well, to gild the cedar frieze Of his palace galleries ; Well, to nail the silver plates On his inner palace gates ; For the Queen would have it so Fifteen hundred years ago ! THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 385 Walking on his roof, he spied Streets and lanes and quarters teeming j Saw his city spreading wide. Ah ! but mean and sad of seeming Show those lowly wooden huts Underneath the King's house gleaming ; Though each humble wicket shuts One world out and one world in, That so great and this so small. Yet, to the poor hearts withiii, The little world their all in all ! Just then the waiting-maids bore through The breakfast of King Nintoku. Quoth the Emperor gazing round " Wherefore, when my meats abound, See I not much smoke arise From these huts beneath mine eyes ? Chimneys jut into the air, Yet no chimney-reek is there Telling that the household pot Bubbles glad with gohan* hot. Gild me no more galleries, If my people pay the gold! Let my gates unplated go, If the silver leaves them cold ! This city of all tax I ease For three years ! We decree it so ! From all huts there shall be smoke ! " Thus the Emperor Nintok spoke. Sped three years. Upon his roof The Monarch paced again. Aloof His Empress hung, ill-pleased to see The snows drip through her gallery, The gates agape with cracks, and grey For wear and weather : " Consort ! say If so the Emperor of Japan Should lodge, like some vile peasant man, Whose thatch leaks for a load of straw ? " "Princess august, what recks a flaw," * Boiled rice. 2 B 386 SEAS AND LANDS. Nintok replied, " in gate or wall, AVlien, far and wide, those chimneys all Fling their blue house-flags to the sky, Where the gods count them 1 Thou and I Take part in all the poor folks' health The people's weal makes princes' wealth ! " There is yet another form of the hibachi, in the guise of a little portable fire-box, called the hvairo, which is made of tin, in the shape of a curved cigar case, with a little sliding lid ; the tin is perforated with small holes, and then covered with a coat of muslin. Small sticks of powdered charcoal are furnished with the kivairo, and you light one of these, pop it in the case, close the lid, and wrap the little fire-box in a cloth or handkerchief. The thin muslin cover admits the air, while it prevents the dust of the charcoal from escaping, and, with one of these little inventions thrust into the bosom or the sleeve, the coldest journey by kuruma or railway will be stripped of its terrors. The regulations have been published for the first elections in Japan of the new House of Represen- tatives, and it may be interesting to many in Eng- land to note the commencement of the youngest Parliamentary system in the world. The Empire is divided into cities, fu, and prefectures, ken, on the principle of equal representation, as far as possible, for equal numbers of the population. The three chief cities return 29 members out of a total of 300, Tokio having the lion's share (12), and Osaka coming next with 10. Of the 42 prefectures by which the remaining 271 members are returned, the THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 387 most largely represented are Niigata (13), Hyogo (12), Aichi (n), Hiroshima (10), and Fukuoka (9), while those returning the smallest number namely, three each are Miyaski, Tottori, and Yamanashi. The qualifications for electors are that they must be Japanese subjects, and have attained the full age of twenty-five years before the day of voting, which is settled for July i ; also that they must have fixed THE KAGO. their permanent residence in the city or prefecture, and actually resided there for not less than one year previous to the date of drawing up the electoral list. That date being April i, whereas the election day is July i, the residence qualification really extends to a period of fifteen months. The property qualifi- cation is high. An elector must have property in 3 88 SEAS AND LANDS. land, or an income accruing from other sources so large as to involve a payment of direct national taxes to the extent of fifteen yen yearly. When the Law of Election was promulgated, some dis- cussion arose as to the interpretation of the term " direct national taxes," but all doubt is removed by the supplementary ordinance, where land-tax and income-tax are alone recognised. It thus appears that to exercise the franchise a man must possess either land of the taxable value of 600 yen, or an income of 1000 yen annually; and, further, that in the case of land he must have been paying such a tax for a full period of one year, and in the case of income for a full period of three years, before the day on which the electoral roll is made up. You will see that the suffrage in Japan is even more limited than that under Servius Tullius, and that all your bygone struggles about compound householders, lodgers, and the residuum, have still to come. Nor do the Japanese intend to tolerate disturbance, irregularity, or any pretence at secret voting. In the first place, admission to the voting booth will only be permitted to holders of entrance tickets. On these entrance tickets, which are to be distributed to the electors at least five days before the time of voting, the name of the elector and his number on the electoral list will be in- scribed, and the ticket must be handed by the elector to the doorkeeper of the voting booth at the moment of admission. Should the place be inconveniently crowded, the electors will receive tickets regulating the order in which they are to THE JAPANESE HEARTH. 389 vote. Each elector, after having gained admittance to the booth by means of a ticket, gives his name to the presiding official, the Headman of the district, with whom are associated not fewer than two, and not more than five, witnesses, nominated by the Headman three days previously. The Headman, having compared the name with the electoral list, hands a voting paper to the elector, who is required to inscribe thereon the name of the person he votes for, together with his own name and residence, and to affix his stamp. The voting paper is then placed in the ballot-box, a receptacle having two lids, each fitted with a different key, one key being in the custody of the Headman, the other in that of the witnesses. The polling being over, the ballot-box is shut, and on the next day is forwarded, in charge of one or more witnesses, to the district office of the place of polling. There it is opened by the chairman of election, with whom is associated a committee of not fewer than three and not more than seven, chosen from among the witnesses assembling from the different voting places. It is evident that each elector's manner of voting will be virtually public property, since his name and the way in which he cast his vote will be known not only to the Headmen of districts, but also to the committees of electors. However, there is nothing like beginning quietly, and the substantial landowners and moneyed men, who alone will be entitled to vote, may be trusted, I think, to return a Japanese House of Commons, which, during its four years of session, will be reasonable and moderate. Foreigners and priests 390 SEAS AND LANDS. are specially excluded from becoming candidates, but the Buddhists of all sects are now engaged in making a vigorous, yet, as I expect, a perfectly vain protest against this exclusion. You will observe that every elector is required to stamp his voting paper with his own seal. That is how everybody signs receipts and such like docu- ments in this country, where each person carries a delicately cut ivory signet in a little box of the same material, which also contains a small recep- tacle filled with moist vermilion. You lift the little seal, engraved with Japanese characters, from its place, touch it with the vermilion, and impress upon paper or parchment the flower, the leaf, the name, the Nippon or Chinese symbol, or the little pro- verb which is your characteristic mark. Mine bears the maxim in the vernacular, " Wataru sekai ni oni wa nashi," which being interpreted is, " In going round the world you will not meet one devil." Such has been my own experience, for everywhere on this globe there are kindness, goodwill, and fellowship to be found by him who brings the same commodities in exchange. AZABU, TOKIO, Feb. 17, 1890. THE AUTHOB'S "HAN. CHAPTER XXIV. " KWAJT ! KWAJI ! " WE have assisted lately with great concern, if with much interest at two extensive conflagrations in this city. Almost all the houses in Tokio are built of wood. Far and wide, from any of the many eminences of the capital, you may see interminable streets, lanes, and crowded blocks, stretching away in one direction towards the sea, in another towards the hills, all alike roofed with black and white tiles, all alike or at least ninety-five out of the hundred put together with posts, and beams, and joists, and frames of the universal white pine. In consequence of this style of architecture, Tokio, like all other towns and cities of Japan, is extremely inflammable, and from time to time a conflagration breaks out in some densely-populated centre, and sweeps away the little dwellings by the score and the hundred, some- times even by the thousand. The fear of this hangs perpetually over all our chds, or districts. Every- where you see rising high in the air the double ladder, on the top of which a fireman is perched, with his legs over the cross-beam, and by his side suspended a large bronze bell, which he strikes with a hammer when the fatal glare of flame and the 392 SEAS AND LANDS. rolling volumes of smoke announce the reappear- ance of the enemy. You can tell by the number of strokes on the bell which is the quarter attacked, if you only know how the chds are numbered, for the Hansho, or fire-gong, strikes the figure in separate and solemn beats. If it be a case of proxi- mus Ucalegon of next-door neighbours, so to speak standing in danger, there will be much commotion in the district ; but the announcement of a distant blaze attracts little notice. Sometimes, however, especially at night, the lurid reflection from the sky, and the dark clouds of smoke obscuring moon and stars, denote a really serious conflagration, and then a great many of us I mean of my fellow-citizens in Tokio flock and scurry to the spot, anxious to see, and, if it may be, perhaps to help. The first of the two fires broke out in Akasaka, a neighbouring quarter, and when we arrived on the spot the flames were raging over the only portion of the large block of dwellings which they had not yet devoured. A high wind had been blowing, and the little hand-engines of the Japanese could do next to nothing against the fierce wall of fire which swept through and over the small, fragile abodes. On the alarm being given, the soldiers belonging to the Imperial Guard march to the spot, and there is a rush on the part of the various fire brigades, each of them under different management. These carry flags, with badges and various devices inscribed upon them, as well as curiously-shaped posts of painted wood, and the object is to get to the scene "KWAJI/ KWAyi/" 393 of action earliest, and to plant the company's banner as far forward as possible upon some house-roof, so as to establish credit and rights of priority. But, of course, the small machines which they carry cannot budge from the well which supplies them with water, nor can the hand-levers, however willingly worked, propel the fluid very far through the hose. In conse- quence, the gallant Japanese firemen have generally to wait for the flames to come to them, and then they squirt vigorously upon them for awhile, mostly in vain, until, to save their engine and themselves, they must retreat, scorched and blackened. There is no lack of courage and devotion in these good fellows. Clad in suits of thick quilted cotton, with hoods or helmets of the same dark blue and white material, you see them affront the flames, like veri- table salamanders, and the great black holes burned in their haori show palpably enough that they have not spared for exertion. A Japanese house, how- ever, is as inflammable as a kitchen fire laid for lighting. The paper shoji, the rain-shutters (made), and the thin partition walls, are all as dry as tinder, with the perpetual inside warmth of the hibachi ; and once kindled, the little residence becomes a bonfire in five minutes. On the other hand, they are very easily pulled down, and the efforts of the firemen are generally directed towards thus making a vacant space in front of the flames. The self-possession of the residents is remarkable, and due, no doubt, to the fact that few or none of them own the dwellings which they inhabit. As soon as they have removed 394 SEAS AND LANDS. their few belongings, they seem rather to enjoy the spectacle of the scarlet tongues licking up a large part of their city, and the black smoke making great strange clouds in the sky. But then comes for some of them a " bad quarter of an hour," when the con- flagration rolls near, and the sparks begin to lodge and crackle all over their roofs and doors. The fire- men naturally want to pull the place down to the ground, and the tenants as naturally wish to wait, hoping that a gust of wind from a different quarter, or a heavy fall of rain, may spare their abode. Hereon ensues a very animated discussion in the midst of the wild scene, which generally ends by firemen, tenants, and all around chopping and tearing at the little domicile, until it comes toppling to the earth in a dusty ruin of beams, tiles, planks, and framing. When this devastation has continued for about an hour, the sides of the neighbouring streets will be lined thick and deep with the humble properties salvaged from the flames. They are all of the same order, and of an almost pathetic simplicity. The gar- ments of the household are the chief objects of anxiety. These particularly the kimono, obi, and eri-maki of the women and children are always kept very carefully in the tansA, or chests of drawers, which the Japanese so highly prize. They are an extremely tidy people, and fold, brush, and put away their cherished dresses with a neatness which would charm and teach even an English country lady. At the first real alarm the tansd are locked and carried outside, either to the house of the nearest friend "KWAJI! KWAJI/" 395 who is in a safer position, or to the side of the road, where the mother or grandmother is placed in charge, and, with the babies of the establishment around her also very promptly and tenderly salvaged calmly smokes her pipe, lighted from some convenient burn- ing fragment of a neighbour's abode. Next to their wardrobes, the desire is to save the mats (tatami), which are easily taken up and removed, and, after this, the sliding shutters of frame and paper, the hibachi and the Buddha pictures, and the dressing and sewing boxes will be hurriedly caught up and added to the family ruins stacked beside the gutter. In the middle of the conflagration, or of the charred ruins it has caused, stand up the few stone or brick- built "go-downs" of the locality, like islands in a fiery sea. A good number of small valuables will have been deposited in these by neighbours, and there is in many houses a little receptacle, either underground or made of masonry, where anything particularly precious can be stored. But really no- body in the quarter seemed to own anything that could be called precious, and I doubt if a London marine-store keeper would have given half a sove- reign for any single pile of household goods which we saw. The scene at such a fire is indescribable, unless you know the population and the picturesque byways of a Japanese city. The bustling little firemen in their quilted coats, the waving flags, the little noisy but ineffective engines whisking about on hand-carts or on the shoulders of coolies, the stream of people carrying out boxes and mats, and 396 SEAS AND LANDS. the counter- stream jostling along to see or to assist, the self-important police and soldiers, the placid amusement of the citizens, till their own time comes ; the odd things that turn up from the houses, the air thick with a black snow of paper shoji burn- ing ; the chatter, the clatter, the universal good-will, but equally universal indiscipline and laissez faire, make a Tokio fire something to see and remember. Happily, not many lives are ever lost. Upper stories are rare, and there are few places in a Japanese dwelling where you might not make an extemporary door with a strong push of the shoulder or a pocket- knife. The second of the two large conflagrations took place at Dobocho Mita, in the Shiba district, near our hill, and destroyed, before it burnt itself out, nearly 1000 dwellings. It was curious in going afterwards over the space thus cleared to note how completely a whole Japanese street will disappear. The houses, containing no brick or metal work, burn completely away, except the charred debris which the tiles extinguish and partly save when they come down with a crash at last. Amid the ruins there will be little or nothing to show they were human habitations, except a broken sake bottle or two and a singed broom. Yet the great heat of the flames as they sweep over is shown by the clay under the floors burnt into red-brick stuff. No sooner are the flames extinguished than the energetic and light- hearted Japanese stick up a paper tablet to notify to whom the dwelling belonged, and go to work to "KWAJI! KWAJI!" 397 set it up again. They do this with such rapidity that instances have been known of dwellings re- erected on the ruins, which have been consumed by the same conflagration suddenly taking a new turn. The neighbourly kindness and the strong bond between relatives and friends which distin- guish the Japanese people, come out well on these occasions. The three or four thousand persons sud- denly evicted by this second fire had all, some- how, found temporary shelter on the same night, although the Shiba schoolroom in Shimoricho had to be thrown open for the reception of some of the sufferers. A public-spirited citizen, Mr. Makino of Kami Nibancho, generously gave six houses rent free for thirty days to others ; and almost by that time no doubt the quarter will be nearly rebuilt with new dwellings, destined like most of the houses in Tokio, for want of good fire-engines and broader streets to a repetition of the same fate. Education in Japan is plentiful, good, and cheap. I lately visited a large and excellent school here, containing a thousand pupils, with English and Japanese professors, privately managed, where the students paid only one yen per month, that is to say, about 35. ^d., for as much learning of various sorts as they could imbibe. A second school which we inspected, under the direction of a Canadian mission, was devoted to young Japanese ladies of the upper and professional classes, who, it seems, will go anywhere to be instructed, regardless of religious denomination. It was good to see in one 398 SEAS AND LANDS. large hall about 200 of these pretty, demure, gentle Nippon girls, all working hard at learning English, and many of them fairly proficient in it. The little ones, to the number of twenty or thirty, sang us some charming songs, and went through some graceful calisthenic exercises with Indian clubs ; and certain of the older maidens played to us on the piano, and recited passages of English poetry. In return for this I was called upon to make them a little speech, and, knowing this beforehand, I had the boldness to string together a few sentences in Japanese, the English of which I first pronounced, and then, not without an occasional little soft ripple of laughter from the pleasant audience at my blunders, this bit of broken Japanese, which may at least tell you what the difficult language looks like and sounds like : " Nihon bakari, hoka no kuni wa nai to iu koto nareba go chumon-dori ! Hoka no kuni ga takusan atte wa, so wa ikazu. Mina kuni uchi Eikok-kuni gakumon wa, chikara wa, hon wa, uta wa, hi to wa ichiban. Koko kara mini, kuni-ezu no ue ni, chisai gozarimas. Shikashi Eikok-kuni honto ni ichiban okina gozarimas ; sore kara, Eikok no kotoba no benkyo yoroshii ! Nihonjin ni wa eigo wo takusan hito wakarimas onna kodomo de mo, ima mimas takusan gozarimas ! Eikok-kuni no kotoba wa taihen irikunda mono de gozaimas domo! taiso muzukashii. Shikashi shidai ni o yomi ni hana, ga saki, mi ga nari, kwairaku no shurtii ga oku mo okiku mo naru wakari kitte iru te shite mireba, Iro iro nani-ka / KWAJI/" 399 no sewa ga yaketari, samazama no tsurai koto ni tabi- tabi, attari shite. Aa ! Knrushii ! Kurushii ! Jitsu ni, kono yo ga iya ni natta to toki-doki omou koto, mo arimashita ga. Sono toki ni eikok no gakumon no o wakari tanoshimi ka, kane ka, kusuri ka, shindai ka mo shiranai." All this in my English address would be : " If only Japan existed if there were no other countries except Japan then, indeed, you could all do as you pleased. But there are so many other countries which you must learn about, so that this is out of the question. Of all those countries there is none so famous or so interesting as England, whether for learning, for power, for books, for poetry, or for renowned men. To look upon her from this place, to study her on the map, she, no doubt, seems small, but in reality she is the largest empire in all the world. Therefore to study her language is excellent. Among the people of Japan there are many who understand English, and, as I am glad to see to-day, many also of Japanese young ladies. The grammar of English is, I fear, sadly difficult ; grievously embarrassing, indeed. But at the last its study produces flowers, produces fruit, produces all kinds of pleasures and advantages. It is too certain that in life every sort of trouble must be expected, when oftentimes, without a resource, one would have to say that life was not worth living. At such times, among other solaces, to know English may prove such joy, such wealth, such remedy, such a possession as I know not how to describe." 400 SEAS AND LANDS. Our English colony here, and the Europeans generally, are much excited by the approaching visit of their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, who are expected to come to Japan early in April. They will be lodged at the British Legation, which, we have happy reason to know, is a very commodious and agreeable place, and in their short but welcome sojourn they will doubtless see enough of Japan to make them wish for a longer stay. Their Royal Highnesses will be fortunate in arriving just at the time when the blossoms of the cherry-trees the great sight of Japan begin to show their beauty at Uyeno, where also a great National and Metropolitan Exhibition is about to open. AZABU, TOKIO, March 7, 1890. CHAPTER XXV. DAILY LIFE. DAILY life with a Japanese family of the middle classes is a very different existence from any led in the West, and in many respects somewhat peculiar and interesting. I will try to tell you how they pass the twenty-four hours, as far as indoor matters go. A sense of emptiness and insufficiency would be felt by the Western house- wife in passing through the six or eight little apartments constituting a Japanese domicile. The snow-pure mattings would please her, and the scrupulous cleanliness of the woodwork and of the inner shoji, prettily covered as these are with silver or gold stamped paper. And she would like the neat little daidokord, or kitchen, with its low stove and quaint brass and copper nabes hung in a shining row. But where are the beds, she would ask, and the furniture? and the stores? and the clothes ? and the household linen ? As for the bedding, it consists of large quilted rugs of cotton, which are rolled up every morning and put into the todana, those concealed cupboards behind the shoji. In the same place, or some odd corners, will stand the tansu, chests of drawers, 401 2 C 402 SEAS AND LANDS. which the Japanese carpenters are very skilful in making, and in which the bright and pretty kimono, the obi, the hizamaki, and other articles of dress are very neatly laid away. There will be, more- over, in the apartment the indispensable hibachi fire-box and near at hand a little glass cup- board to hold tea-cups and tea, with, perhaps, a nuimono, i.e., work-box, a little dressing-case with a mirror on the top, and the omnipresent apparatus of wood and copper which holds the tobacco, the pipes, and the ever-lighted charcoal. Household linen hardly exists. The Japanese use no sheets or tablecloths ; for towels they have little squares of blue and white cotton ; for dusters the feather or paper brush ; and for handkerchiefs, napkins, &c., rolls of whitey-brown paper. As for stores, the bazaars near at hand supply them freshly with daily necessities, and they keep very little in the larder except some slices of daikon, some rice, and sweet biscuits. The man in blue, with the copper- bound tubs, is always passing their door, calling aloud " Honourable live fish ! " Eggs are cheap and plentiful ; bread is never used ; and the musume easily brings home, in a folded bamboo or rape leaf, whatever else is needed for the day. Rice is the mainstay, and a huge quantity of it is always kept ready boiled, needing only to be warmed up or mixed with hot tea. It is bed-time. The inmates have played many games at hana with little coloured cards, or on the *' go " board, struggling to make rows of five with DAILY LIFE. 403 black or white counters ; or, if there be children, some graceful and charming game, like "the fox trap," Kitsune make, or the "blind devil." The samisen has t wangled to many a tender or merry song, and some one at last says " nemui," "I am sleepy." Then the futons are brought out and laid down on the mats two to lie upon, and two for cover; and the small pillows, makura, of polished wood with rolls of paper on the top, are placed at the head of the simple couch, along with the tobacco- mono and the lamp. A Japanese lady makes a very swift and easy toilette de nuit. It is not necessary for her even to retire for this purpose. Selecting from the tanzu a gaily coloured jiban of scarlet or yellow or crimson cotton, and a night kimono of cotton or silken cre"pe, she turns to the wall, throws these over her shoulders, loosens her obi, and lets fall her garments of the day, substituting those of the night with an incredible and extremely modest dexterity. She binds the pretty cotton raiment loosely round her loins with a soft silken girdle, and is then ready for bed, pillowing her glossy little head, with its elaborate structure of coils, and tufts, and silken cushions, on the makura. The house is fastened up with wooden bolts, or tiny pins of iron, which would make a London burglar smile ; and, truth to tell, housebreaking is not very uncommon in Tokio, where it is always too possible, especially now that rice is so dear, to wake up and find some scoundrel with a sharp sword in his hand, and his head wrapped in a cloth, who wants, and means to 4 o 4 SEAS AND LANDS. have, the loose cash in the house. But there is, at all events, the protection of the momban, or night watchman, who wakes you up perpetually to let you know the hour, by beating two slabs of wood together ; and the danger of fire is far greater than that of the robbers, the dorobo. The Japanese are fine sleepers, and the house will probably be peaceful enough till the cocks in the morning crow in un- welcome chorus, roku-ji-han, roku-ji-han, " half-past six o'clock." The first thing a Japanese dame does upon waking is to reach out for the tobacco-mono, to fill the little brass pipe, to light, and smoke it. The women do this almost as much as the men. Then the Japanese lady rises, detaches from her arm the ude-mamori a little black velvet band, filled with musk, which she always wears draws on the white socks, her tabi, and repairs to the bath-room, where she brushes her teeth with the yoji, scrapes her tongue with its flexible handle, scrubs her little face with a small, soft brush, dipped in perfumed face powder, smooths into proper place the rebellious jet-black hairs which have strayed during the night from her shining coiffure, and lightly touches her lower lip with a little rouge from the benizara. Then she changes her night garments for those of the day, a some- what elaborate process. First goes on the imoji, a square of cotton cloth, folded round the waist ; then the day jiban, very splendid and many-coloured, of which, however, glimpses will only be casually caught when the wind blows aside the two or DAILY LIFE. 45 three outer kimono. These, in their turn, follow, and are each folded over the bosom, from left to right. Upon the outer kimono she ties, low down, a girdle of soft silk crepe, taking what the sailors call " a round turn " higher up on the waist with the same piece of silk. This holds the garments all in place ; but over it, and partly concealing it, "TUB. is now adjusted the obi proper a broad belt of black or coloured satin, eight feet long which, after being carefully doubled and wound round the middle of the body, is brought up at the back, through itself, so as to hang in a loop down to the hollow of the knees. Next, an elastic string obi-dome is passed through the loop, and lifting it up, and being fastened in front, the satin band 406 SEAS AND LANDS. forms the broad lappet behind so distinctive of Japanese dress, and in front a most convenient re- ceptacle in the hollow of this girdle for the purse, tobacco-pouch, watch, &c. The serious business of ablution is performed with many, of course, at the daily public baths. While the lady of the house has thus been provisionally adorning herself, and dabbling her small hands in a copper dish of hot water, like a goldfinch at its morning dip, the musume has dusted the whole house with a paper flipper, so that not a speck of dirt is to be seen ; has lit the charcoal ; has set the hibachi ; has placed on it the chased bronze kettle, the porcelain teapot, and the pretty painted cups ; has infused the tea ; has warmed the rice ; has toasted the mochi, and perhaps fried a slice or two of tai, or shake, or hobo, which are very much like our bass, salmon, and gurnard. The Japanese take two solid meals only in the day, nibbling more or less between whiles at cake, sweetmeats, and fruit or nuts. If they are going to the theatre they will start now to make a whole day of it. Indoors the principal occupations of the morning will be endless needlework, strumming of the samisen, with calls and chats from neighbours, when the etiquette observed is wonderful to see and hear. You must know these established forms by heart to be in the mode. With forehead on the mats the incomer says, " Domo," " I was extremely rude to you on the last happy occasion of our meeting." " Oh no ! " replies the hostess ; "it was I who was awfully DAILY LIFE. 407 ill-mannered ; pray excuse me." This really means nothing, as Japanese are never impolite, but is a regular formula. Then, lifting up her nose a little, but still on hands and knees, the visitor says "Thus again to hang in your honourable eyes is immense delight." She goes on : " Sendatte go chizd ni narimashita arigato moshimas" which is to say, referring to some cup of tea or fish sandwich, partaken together, " I thank you for the exquisite feast lately shared in your honourable society." The hostess, raising in turn her face from between her hands, ejaculates, "Do itashimashita?" "What is it I have done? For the various favours of your honourable assistance, 'tis I who should thank you." After this, the tea will be offered, and the ladies settle down on the little square cushions to rapid and rejoicing chatter in their own musical Japanese. The gentlemen of the house have gone off to busi- ness, or politics, or pleasure, as the case may be, but will return to the evening meal, when the mats will be covered with little red boxes of hot food, sent in from the neighbouring yadoya, or cooked at home. A little hot sak& and any amount of hot tea washes down the strange-looking comestibles, and the repast is always crowned with the go-han, the great white tub of steaming rice. In the afternoon they go out for a little walk or some shopping in the Ginza, or to the Kwankoban, or ride in kurumas, two at a time, to see if the cherry-blossoms are coming out at Uyeno, or to visit far-away relations. Or it is, perhaps, ail 408 SEAS AND LANDS. ennichi i.e., festival of some popular Buddhist deity, and there will be a little trip to the temple, * * * a 5P ? X INVITATION TO THE KMlMOItOli S KVKNING PAKTY AT NAGOYA. to pull the twisted rope which calls the attention DAILY LIFE. 409 of Heaven, to say the little silent prayer, and to buy at the booths round the shrine a new hairpin, a picture of Buddha on gilt paper, or some toys for the children. Life, as you will see, is not looked upon in a very serious light by my charming fellow- citizens hereabout. I sometimes, indeed, think they must all have been birds in a previous existence they have the same delightful way of doing nothing NAGOYA. very busily, chirping through the days of existence, preening their bright feathers, pecking for ever at some tiny foolish food, and loving so intensely sing- ing, and sunshine, and the blossoms. When they fall ill the first thing they do is to swallow, in warm water, a small picture of Buddha on soft paper. If this fails to effect a cure as will occasionally 4io SEAS AND LANDS. happen the Issha San arrives the native physi- cian and kneels by the side of the futdns. He feels the small brown wrist, listens to the little troubled Asiatic heart, and prescribes something that Western science has taught him is better than Buddha for the stomach-ache. The healthy blood and cheerful nature of Japanese patients greatly assist his prescription, and the sufferer is either very soon well again, or by-and-by is gone, by way of the burning ground, to be a Hotoke Sama, a freed spirit lighted by the Kadobi, the death-lamp, which -shows the way leading towards the next world, into a better and happier country than even graceful and glad Japan. I have just received an invitation from the Em- peror's Master of the Household to the grand review of the fleet and army at Nagoya, at the end of this month. I am to have a horse, quarters, and the honour of presentation to His Imperial Majesty, and to see the fighting forces of Japan gloriously arrayed. The two contending armies in the approaching manoeuvres are to be divided as follows : The eastern or defending force will consist of about 16,000 soldiers, 500 officers, and forty-eight guns. The western or attacking force will have an equal number of officers, guns, and men. The 3rd and 4th regiments of infantry and detach- ments of cavalry and artillery of the Imperial Body- guard will act as auxiliaries. Lieutenant-General Viscount Takeshima commands the defending and Lieutenant-General Kurokawa the attacking force. DAILY LIFE. 4" The defending force will be assisted by the men-of- war Kongo, Chikushi, Tenryo, Maya, and Ho-sho; and the attacking force by the Naniwa, Takachiho, Fuso, Musashi, Katsuragi, and Yamato. Rear- Admiral Fukushima will command the former, and Rear-Admiral Inoue the latter. The programme of the Emperor's movements will be as follows : On the 28th inst. he will leave the capital ; on the 2Qth he will be at Nagoya inspecting the arrangements there ; and the next day he will proceed to the port of Handa on the Chita peninsula to witness a naval engagement, returning to Nagoya the following day (the 3ist). April ist and 2nd will be spent in watch- ing engagements on land. The attacking force will attempt a landing at Handa, which will be defended by the opposite force. There will be a two days' engagement on sea and also on land, resulting in the repulse of the defending army and the landing of the assailants. The ist Brigade of the Imperial Bodyguard leaves the capital on the i8th inst., and will travel by forced marches to Nagoya, covering about six m per day. The journey will thus occupy about thirteen days. The two days' engagement on land on April ist and 2nd is expected to take place about Goyu and Narumi. AZABU, TOKIO, JAPAN, March 18, 1890. CHAPTER XXVI. MILITANT JAPAN. I HAVE just returned to my Japanese hotel from the battlefield near Otaka, where the troops of all arms of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan have to-day fought a brilliant engagement, happily as bloodless as it was picturesque, interesting, and instructive. I mentioned in a previous letter that I had received the honour of an invitation to attend these manoeuvres of the imperial forces at Nagoya. The navy as well as the army was to join in them, and they were to be more complete and important than anything of the kind heretofore displayed in Japan. Of the naval portion of the fighting I can tell you nothing except from hearsay, for the action by sea was terminated before our large party of ministers, diplomatists, officers of State, and two or three specially-invited foreigners, arrived at the scene of combat. There were, how- ever, not less than fifteen men-of-war of various types engaged, besides numerous gunboats and torpedo-boats ; and I was informed that the opera- tion of covering the landing of a large body of troops was admirably managed. An excellent authority here, Captain Ingles, R.N., who is high MILITANT JAPAN. 413 in the service of the Japanese Admiralty, and an officer of our own navy, assured me on the field of battle to-day that he hardly knew how to find any fault at all with the Japanese officers and crews of His Majesty's fleet. He described to me an opera- tion effected by the captain of the ironclad on board of which he sailed, who, on receiving a sudden signal, slipped and buoyed his anchor, and got under weigh within ten minutes, afterwards bring- ing his ship back, and picking up the buoy again in the dark by very dexterous navigation. He declared the thing could not have been performed more handsomely in a Queen's ship. The Japanese bluejackets dress and look very much like British men-of-warsmen, tanned brown by the sun. They have adopted our naval uniform and system in every point, and possessing great aptitude for the sea, as is shown by the skill of the sampanmen, and the hardihood of the coast fishermen, they make Captain Ingles said really first-rate seamen. With the patience of Asiatic blood, they have none of its languor. They are alert, intelligent, brave, and docile to manage beyond the experience of perhaps any other flag upon the ocean. Punishment is hardly known in the Emperor's warships, being so seldom necessary ; and if the Government of Japan would do as much for the navy as for the army, and strive in every way to develop its strength and popularity, Japan might become, I believe, the England of the Pacific, and make the white flag with the crimson sun upon it pre-eminent in these seas. 4 i4 SEAS AND LANDS. But our business was not " on the great waters," and the fleet had had its innings, and was peaceably moored in the bay when our long train steamed into Nagoya Station, after a journey of 200 miles from the capital. Nagoya is a large and well-looking city of about 125,000 inhabitants, planted in a plain on the south-western coast ; at this season coloured all green with the barley, and golden with the blossom of the rape. Its streets are wide and well kept, and were gay with triumphal arches, made of fir and bamboo arid paper peony flowers, and also with flags and lanterns. Its principal building is the Shiro, or castle, and the Honganji Temple, contain- ing something which is both a temple and a palace, where the Mikado was quartered. The castle is fortified by ancient walls of massive masonry, and is extremely pictorial in general effect. The high stone walls, built in the style termed by the Romans opus incertum, are topped with white tower houses of Chinese fashion, and in the centre rises a five- storeyed pagoda-like edifice, surmounted by two famous dolphins made of plates of gold, which glitter bravely in the sunshine. One of these fish has had extraordinary adventures, having been sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and then sunk at sea in returning on board the Messageries steamer Nil. It was got up again, however, and brought home to its proper place, to the great delight of Nagoya. That city was all ablaze with excitement and loyalty when I arrived. Every house, without exception, had dis- played the white flag with the red sun, on a golden- MILITANT JAPAN. 415 tipped bamboo, and a paper lantern, of the same national colours. This unity of decoration painted the town all white and red, and produced a charm- ing effect. Quarters were difficult to obtain, but by the courtesy of the Minister of the Household, Mr. Nagasaki, and the kind offices of my friend, Mr. Yamada, I was well lodged, and, having had a coloured scarf bound round my right arm, I wandered everywhere at pleasure, and had ample opportunities of observing everything. The first day of the manoeuvres passed near Karya, and I will not dwell upon them, the interest consisting chiefly in military technics. All trains being full, we returned across country in our jin- rikishas, passing through an interesting region of sandhills and rice-fields, and leaving the two armies moving to meet each other on the next day at a point about seven miles from Nagoya. Thither we repaired early on the following morning, along a road presenting all the appearance of active war. Trains of Chinese ponies, with ammunition and provisions, spades and pickaxes, stretchers and medical stores, filed along. Every now and then the way was blocked by detachments of infantry marching at quick step to the battlefield. Then we would overtake batteries of light or heavy artillery rumbling along into action. There was very little cavalry, the country not being adapted for that arm, but the infantry and artillery engaged amounted altogether to nearly 30,000. Threading our way through the martial throng, we reached at 4 i6 SEAS AND LANDS. last a village, where we dismounted and took a wooded path leading into the hills. At this moment the roar of cannon and the crackle of musketry announced the scene of action to be near, and we came upon two companies lying concealed in the thick underwood. A little farther and we emerged upon the brow of a hill, where the picture of mimic warfare suddenly developed itself. A long sand- stone ridge, some two or three hundred feet above the valleys and the rice-fields beneath, was faced by a corresponding and almost parallel ridge, the latter being held by the hostile army. Ours, with which was His Majesty, distinguished by white covers upon all the soldiers' caps, occupied the range nearest to Nagoya, and we had already brought up to the rim of the hill three batteries of mountain guns, which kept up a constant fire on the enemy's pieces, and on such masses of his infantry as could be seen or guessed at in the close bush opposite. Our artillerymen were serving their little guns with admirable regularity. Near and far amid the dwarf trees lay hidden large bodies of our men, and it was interesting to notice how very few could be dis- cerned out of the considerable number of troops upon the field. Behind the shelter of the hill the artillery horses, with the chargers of the staff and the ponies of the ambulance, were picketed, and under its brow the two war-horses of the Emperor were being walked about covered with cloths of green satin, emblazoned with the gold chrysan- themum. His Majesty himself, the Mikado, stood MILITANT JAPAN. 417 amid the cannon smoke, with a brilliant staff around him, wearing a military cap and coat, and buckskin breeches, with high boots. He was the umpire and final arbiter of the day, and as I stood near him I was impressed by the high intelligence of his counte- nance and the close attention which he displayed. The foreign ministers, in full uniform, and wearing their orders, added to the brilliance of the warlike spectacle, which could not have had a more pictur- esque mise-en-scene. The sandhills on which we stood, covered with dwarf fir-trees, were coloured almost as purple as the Scotch moors in autumn by the purple blossoms of the Tsutsuji, or wild azalea, the green and purple being further diversified by the dark blue uniforms with red or yellow facings of the imperial troops. We have been hammering away for two hours with the little seven-pounder Krupps, till they are too hot to touch ; our skirmishers have pushed forward far down the hill, almost to the edge of the rice-fields and to the road skirting them. A mile away on the right flank our batteries have either silenced the enemy, or he is preparing some new and daring combination. This proves to be the case, for, on a sudden, the thickets opposite send forth a large body of infantry, who begin to cross the rice-fields at a run, with a view of driving in our skirmishers, and perhaps storming our ridge. The spectacle is curious. A rice-field region looks like an interminable chess-board, the squares being the rice-plots, full of mud and 2 D 4 i8 SEAS AND LANDS. water, and the dividing lines the tiny, raised path- ways, which shut the water in and give access to the crops. Along these countless lines, darting hither and thither like knights on the chess-board, come the enemy's soldiers. At the first sight of them our heavy batteries of Krupp twelve-pounders are brought up at a gallop to silence the reopen- ing guns of the foe, while our troops from the rear hasten to line every yard of the ridge, and a lively fire from thousands of rifles is answered by shots and volleys from the hitherto concealed enemy. If it had been real warfare I do not think a third of this attacking force could have crossed the rice-fields alive. Bullets and grape had full time, I thought, at a range of less than a mile, to bag them like so many wisps of snipe. But as it is they swarm across ; they line the far side of the road ; they drive in our foremost skirmishers ; they even begin to climb stealthily up our hill, while the bronze Krupp guns, now almost red-hot, are jumping with incessant rounds, and their roar, along with the crackle of the musketry, makes the stallions behind the brow wild with excitement. At this juncture, when some of the enemy have come into our cannon- smoke, and the valley is nearly hidden in its volumes, the Emperor utters a command. The little pennon of scarlet silk with the gold sun upon it, carried wherever he moves, is waved as a signal, and the bugles all along our line blow MILITANT JAPAN. 419 the familiar notes of the "Cease firing." In an instant war is changed by magic into peace, the thick smoke rolls away from the purple azaleas, the Knipps cool down, the dust-covered artillery- men take breath, and return their spare cartridges to the field magazine ; and when we see the Imperial attendants spreading a blue satin cloth, with gold chrysanthemums worked on it, over some limber chests, and setting out the Emperor's bento, or lunch, we all imitate the Royal example, and proceed to open those neat little boxes in which the Japanese pack up a cold repast, break- ing the lids up into chopsticks. We afterwards effected a masterly retreat along the Nagoya road, lost in a cavalcade of staff, horse, and artillery, and overtaking many regiments, already marching to Nagoya for the review of the next day. I do not pretend to military knowledge, but I have seen almost all existing armies, and am quite sure that better judges than myself would pronounce the Japanese soldiers to be excellent material. Every- thing about them looked business-like, soldierly, and substantial. Their arms were in good order; their bearing alert, eager, and intelligent ; and, although on foot for two days together, with much marching, I noticed only two or three fall out from fatigue. Their officers wisely allow them to exchange, when they like, their heavy regimental boots for the easy ivaraji or sandal, and in consequence there are no sore feet. Their uniform is of the German type, chiefly dark blue, with dust-coloured gaiters, and I 420 SEAS AND LANDS. should think that English general fortunate who, in an Asiatic war, could have the assistance of thirty thousand of such men as I saw on the hills of Otaka. Next morning we repaired, in the frock-coats and tall hats which it is Japanese etiquette to wear, to the parade-ground of the Castle, and there- standing or mounted round the Emperor we saw some fifteen or twenty regiments march past the master of these legions and of the fair and pros- perous empire of Japan. As each body of men came to the scarlet and gold pennon carried by a mounted officer at His Majesty's side, they presented arms, and the officers raised their sword-hilts to their foreheads. Some regiments carried colours torn to tatters by hostile bullets in the war of the Rebellion, and these the Emperor always specially saluted. The marching was very good, the lines well dressed. You could, indeed, have rolled a cricket-ball between the files of almost every com- pany. Then the troops drew up in a long front, along which the Mikado rode, with his staff, and we all raced home to our hotels troops, sightseers, diplomatists, and guns, mingled in a dusty, good- tempered column through dense crowds of loyal, sweet-mannered, and orderly Japanese people, and under the bright sunlight of a perfect Japanese spring day. In the evening there was a grand reception at the Hangonji Temple, inside the castle, to which I had the honour of being invited. Everybody wore full MILITANT JAPAN. 421 uniform or Court dress, and the concourse in the vast hall, with its plain wooden pillars, each of them as big as the main-mast of an old three-decker, was very splendid. No ladies were present, and the IN WIKTKB DBE88. Empress herself had stayed behind in Tokio. The Japanese orders of the Rising Sun, the Chrysanthe- mum, and the Sacred Treasure, glittered upon many 422 SEAS AND LANDS. breasts well known in modern Japanese history. The Mikado himself presently came among us, wearing the great gold star of the Rising Sun upon a general's uniform, but soon led the way to another hall, where supper, in the Japanese fashion, had been prepared for three thousand. His Majesty himself supped on a raised platform with a special party, and with this brilliant entertainment the great military pageant of Nagoya may be said to have closed. Returning by the long train journey, I enjoyed at the station of Suz.ukawa a sublime spectacle. The little town stands at the very point where the long foot of Fuji-San slopes into the sea, and I saw that divinely perfect mountain, from base to glorious summit, bathed in burning sunshine, and clearly defined in every inch of her 14,000 feet of elevation. Snow lay thick and dazzling more than half-way down the majestic cone, and at about the snow-line a girdle of golden and rosy clouds belted the Queen of Mountains on her seaward side. Below the cloudy zone were vast sloping grey moors, and lower still a region of green forest, bringing the eye beneath to where, upon her gigantic flanks, an indefatigable agriculture covered her knees and feet with fertility. For a whole hour, as we skirted the splendid eminence and caught new views of her beauty, new colours and shadows on her snows, her clouds, her crags, and her forests, I could not take my eyes from the peerless mountain, by which we had passed without so much as a glimpse of her MILITANT JAPAN. 423 majesty, in the rain and mist of the journey down to Nagoya. Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Connaught will arrive in Yokohama on Tuesday next. The British Legation here has been prepared for their temporary abode in Tokio. They will visit Nikko and Kioto, and see Fuji-San. NAGOYA, April 2, 1890. CHAPTER XXVII. JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. I ASK permission to be serious, and even dull, in both this and the next communication, in order to speak about a subject of vital import to Japan, and, indeed, of international interest that of Treaty Revision. But let me first mention that their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Connaught have left us to-day, after a stay in Japan, which I have the best warrant for saying has been full of very pleasant experiences. The weather, unhappily, has shown itself singularly disloyal and inhospitable. Only two fine days of the real Japanese pattern have smiled upon the Royal visitors ; but they were not to be daunted by this, and have managed to see a great deal of the capital and its neighbourhood, as well as of the people and their customs. They have sailed up the Inland Sea, viewing its unparalleled combinations of islands and waters ; they have stayed at Kobe, Kyoto, and Kamakura ; they have inspected the colossal Buddha at Daibutsu, and dined a la Japonaise, on the mats ; wandered through the Great National Exhibition at Uyeno ; studied the splendid temples at Nikko and Shiba ; and, of course, made innumerable purchases in the ever-fascinating silk JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 425 and curio shops. Yesterday the Emperor returned from Kobe in good time to receive the illustrious guests of his country, first in audience at the Palace, and next at dinner ; and this morning His Imperial Majesty returned, in state, the visit of their Royal Highnesses ; who are at present embarking upon the Abyssinia, of the Canadian Pacific Line, for Van- couver and the journey, through the Dominion, homewards. I have not mentioned, of course, half the functions and ceremonies which have attended the sojourn of their Royal Highnesses in Japan, all of which their inexhaustible geniality and grace have made so successful ; but it is worth while to remark that, in spite of the sadly cloudy and unpropitious weather, the Duchess of Connaught obtained one perfect view of Fuji-San. Her Royal Highness told me that, at the station of Gotemba, which is upon the very base of the matchless mountain, the clouds lifted for a little while and revealed the vision which I lately had the honour of describing to you of this glorious eminence once a terrible volcano, and now the loveliest and most verdant as well as the shape- liest of all the hills of earth bathed in sunlight and radiant with beauty, from her feet, slippered in the gold and green of the spring crops, to her waist girt with the gold and rosy clouds, and head crowned with shining snows. And now for this great and serious matter of Treaty Revision ! No Oriental country ever suddenly attracted so much attention in the West as Japan. Her fine arts first brought her into special notice. 426 SEAS AND LANDS. The rich field she offered at a moment when Europe stood in urgent need of new inspiration, is still only partially explored, yet the Occident has already derived from it a wealth of fresh motives and invigorating suggestions. Folks in the West, how- ever, have not yet drawn from Japanese art the in- ferences it properly suggests. They cannot choose but be charmed by it ; they accept its lessons with gratitude, and frankly acknowledge the debt they owe it ; but of the nation that gave it to them they think little. Politically speaking, Japan is just as far from Europe as she was twenty-five years ago. The impression created by her two centuries of seclusion has not been effaced, and very few people recognise that no longer of her own choice, but on account of Western prejudice and indifference, she is forbidden to emerge com- pletely from the state of isolation which the West itself forced her to abandon in 1858. It is a curious chapter of history, this signal reversal of the posi- tions occupied by Japan and her mentors. The inherent right of every nation to regulate for itself the nature and extent of its intercourse with other states was denied to Japan thirty-three years ago. She was told that the first principles of civilisation and of the federation of humanity were outraged by the selfish assertion of any such right. She was taught that material prosperity is the only genuine basis of international consideration ; that commerce is the parent of prosperity, and that to be successful commerce must be unrestricted. In obedience to JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 427 these doctrines, supported, as they were, by a menace of force majeure, she hesitatingly opened a few of her ports, and suffered her subjects to commence a partial trade with the outer world. But when, by-and-by, she would fain have com- pleted the work would fain have thrown open every part of her empire, and removed all obstacles from the path of commerce Western Governments told her that they did not consider her qualified for equal intercourse, and that the moral and liberal principles which they had preached for the purpose of breaking down her seclusion could not possibly be suffered to have any inconvenient application to their own conduct. It was a surprise to Japan. She did not immediately realise what it signified, but when she came to understand the inequality of Western justice in international matters, and to perceive that there was to be one law for her, and another and an entirely different one for her treaty friends, she began to lose something of her con- fidence in Occidental morality, and to look with doubting eyes on its representatives. It may seem strange to speak of Japan's confi- dence in Western nations, but history shows that her original instincts were all in favour of foreign inter- course. When the Portuguese first came to her shores in 1545 they received kindly welcome, and no obstacles were placed in the way of their com- merce. The Dutch had a similar experience in 1 600, and thirteen years later, the first English ships arriving, Japan readily signed a treaty granting to 428 SEAS AND LANDS. the subjects of Great Britain perpetual license to trade and reside in every part of the empire. The causes that converted, this amicable mood into one of distrust and dislike were chiefly religious. The Portuguese Jesuits, who pioneered Christianity, and who carried its precepts of peace and benevolence into their practice, might have happily continued their successful labours had they not been followed by Dominicans and Franciscans, who quarrelled with each other and with the Jesuits, making Japan for the first time acquainted with the bitterness of sec- tarian strife. Winning converts and wealth, the foreign priests began to exercise the cruel intoler- ance of mediaeval Europe. Japanese dignitaries were insulted, Buddhist temples burned, and pro- pagandism by persecution became the order of the hour. Meanwhile, the avarice and extortion of the Portuguese traders disgusted Japanese officials, and prepared them to believe the false representations of the Dutch, who declared that territorial aggran- disement was the real aim of the Portuguese, and that their religious propagandism was in truth a political campaign. Never before harassed by the clash of militant creeds, the Japanese were pre- pared to extend to foreign faiths the tolerance that marked their attitude towards Buddhism, and the attitude of the numerous sects of Buddhism towards each other. Nobunaga, the secular ruler of Japan, replying to remonstrances prompted by the first symptoms of Christian egotism, said that if Japan could tolerate thirty-five sects of Buddhism she JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 429 might easily bear with a thirty-sixth in the shape of Christianity. When, however, torture, ruin, blood- shed, and rebellion began to dog the footsteps of the Christian propagandists, and when the political designs attributed to them by the Dutch received confirmation in their conduct and demeanour, the Japanese resolved to expel them from the land. It was then that a patriotic aversion to all foreigners grew up, and, being transmitted from father to son as a sacred precept, found expression in the fierce outbursts of murderous opposition which disfigured the early days of renewed foreign intercourse thirty years ago. In the eyes of the Japanese Samurai every Occidental was a Bateren (Padre), an in- triguer against the independence of the " country of the gods." From the moment, however, that this error came to be recognised as it was fully recognised by the remarkable men who planned the overthrow of feudalism, and have since directed Japan's destinies from that moment Japan, laying aside her tem- porary dislike, reverted to the trustful and hospitable mood of the sixteenth century. Welcoming foreign intercourse, she welcomed also foreign civilisation. A period of wonderful progress ensued. In the short space of twenty years new and enlightened criminal codes were enacted ; the methods of judicial pro- cedure were entirely changed ; thoroughly efficient systems of police, of posts, of telegraphs, and of national education were organised ; an army and a navy modelled after Western patterns were formed ; 430 SEAS AND LANDS. the finances of the Empire were placed on a sound basis ; railways, roads, and harbours were con- structed ; an efficient mercantile marine sprang into existence ; the jail system was radically improved ; an extensive scheme of local government was put into operation ; a competitive civil service was organised ; the whole fiscal system was revised ; an influential and widely read newspaper press grew up with extraordinary rapidity ; the people were en- franchised, and government by parliament was sub- stituted for monarchical absolutism. So swift were the phases of this kaleidoscopic scene that foreign observers sometimes doubted its sincerity. Japan, they said, was hiding her old self under a veneer which would certainly be torn off by-and-by. They forgot that the genius of the Japanese people is essentially eclectic ; that in former ages they had not hesitated to borrow, even from the comparatively puny kingdom of Korea, whatever elements of a better civilisation that country had to offer ; that they had laid Chinese civilisation under contribu- tions almost as great as those they were now levying on the civilisation of the West ; that in every case they had shown themselves free from fickleness or lightness of purpose, and that whenever a good system was imported it had taken strong root in Japanese soil, its growth improving largely under Japanese culture, and changing only so far as was necessary to adapt it to a Japanese environment. There was nothing in the nation's ancient history to suggest a danger of superficiality in such matters, and there JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 431 has been nothing in the story of the past twenty years to cast doubt on the stability of the wonderful progress they have witnessed. By the many writers who have spoken in admiring terms of that progress, the title to international consideration which it gives Japan has been unanimously admitted. Yet neither for the sake of her frank adoption of Western civilisation, nor yet in consistent deference to the principle which they formerly compelled her to obey, will Western Powers consent to admit her to equal intercourse with themselves. Neither because she has proved herself worthy of trust by twenty years of persistent effort, nor yet because they have no more right to condemn her to a state of semi-isolation than they had to drag her out of complete isolation in 1858, will the Governments of Europe agree to her proposals for unrestricted intercourse. An impediment, which, though once considerable, has now been reduced to utterly in- significant dimensions, blocks the way. When a covenant was made opening a few ports to foreign vessels, and sanctioning foreign trade within the narrow limits of a few settlements, it was agreed, as became such a system of partial intercourse, that the persons of foreigners should be entirely withdrawn from the processes of Japanese courts, and that in their civil dealings with Japanese they should have equal recourse to their own and to Japanese tribunals. This is the so-called "extra- territorial system." It substitutes consular juris- diction for Japanese in respect of criminal law, 43 2 SEAS AND LANDS. and to that extent deprives Japan of one of the most important sovereign rights of an independent state, judicial autonomy. Under no circumstances a sound system, it has led in Japan's case to many flagrant anomalies and abuses, which have been too often exposed and discussed to need detailed reference here. No one has ever thought of deny- ing, however, that before Japan's laws were revised and her system of police and prisons reformed, she could not reasonably ask to be entrusted with criminal jurisdiction over foreigners. On the other hand, no one pretends that until she is entrusted with such jurisdiction she can possibly allow foreigners to 'trade, travel, and reside where- ever they please in her territories. Even though Western States were willing to establish a com- plete network of Consular Courts at all the prin- cipal towns throughout the empire, the problem would be as far as ever from solution ; for it is obvious that no self-respecting nation could brook the idea of sixteen foreign Powers setting up tri- bunals for themselves, and independently adminis- tering their own laws everywhere within its borders. Foreign Powers, however, have not the smallest intention of incurring any such expense for the sake of the handful of their countrymen residing in Japan. Indeed, not many of them have prac- tically acknowledged that in exempting their sub- jects or citizens from Japanese jurisdiction, they were morally bound to provide an efficient substi- tute for that jurisdiction. The fingers of one hand JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 433 suffice to count the States which have established in the settlements properly equipped courts presided over by duly qualified law officers. To open the country, then, under existing judicial conditions, would be to admit into the interior a number of strangers acknowledging no obligation towards Japanese laws, and released from the effective con- trol of their own ; while, in the event of civil disputes, a Japanese suitor might have to carry his case and his witnesses several hundred miles in order to reach a foreign consular court in the nearest settlement. Thus the complete opening of the country, the removal of all restrictions upon foreign trade, travel, and residence, depends entirely upon the willingness of Western Powers to entrust the persons and properties of their subjects to Japanese jurisdiction. YOKOHAMA, JAPAN, May 10, 1890. 2 E CHAPTER XXVIII. JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS Continued. FOR nineteen years this question of Japan's relations with foreign nations has agitated the minds of the people : for ten it has been the theme of direct negotiation between the Governments of Japan and the Treaty Powers. The treaties concluded in 1858 became subject to revision in 1872 ; but Japan was not then prepared to propose a practical scheme of revision. She was just in the throes of abolishing feudalism, and had not yet found leisure to re- organise her courts or recast her laws. The recovery of her tariff autonomy, however, she had an indis- putable title to demand. Fixed on a nominal basis of 5 per cent., ad valorem, the rates really levied on her foreign trade did not amount to more than an average of 3! per cent., and the country was sadly in need of funds to carry out the numerous reforms it had undertaken. But proposals for tariff -revision were invariably met with a demand for the opening of new ports or some other extension of commercial privileges, whereas Japan was resolutely determined not to suffer the system of consular jurisdiction to be pushed beyond the limits of the settlements already fixed by treaty. She was, therefore, cut off 434 JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 435 from a source of revenue upon which every in- dependent State has an inalienable right to draw. Nay, more ; though she spent millions of dollars on the lighting and buoying of her coasts, she was not permitted to levy a cent of tonnage dues on the ships profiting by these improvements, for in every- thing affecting foreigners the unanimous consent of the sixteen Treaty Powers was an essential pre- liminary, and to obtain that consent proved a hopeless task. Perhaps this tariff question, reacting as it did upon the problem . of internal taxation, helped as much as anything else to concentrate the nation's attention on its humiliating plight. The vernacular press, a rapidly developing power, dwelt strongly on the country's deprivation of its sove- reign rights, and criticised the Government's incompe- tence to recover them ; while the local foreign press retorted in terms of contemptuous intolerance, em- bittering the situation and deepening the nation's sense of injustice by intemperate and scurrilous utterances. Little by little there grew up in the Japanese mind a conviction that the international dealings of Western Powers were governed chiefly by the dictates of Might, and that Right might go a-begging unless it had strength to assert itself. Yet the people preserved their temper wonderfully. Many a time was it remarked that a European nation subjected to similar treatment would have lost patience in a few months, whereas the Japanese maintained, year after year, an invariably friendly and considerate mien. Their confidence in foreigners 436 SEAS AND LANDS. did, indeed, gradually evaporate ; and this, sup- plemented by a morbidly excited anxiety to assert the independence so . persistently withheld from them, affected their treatment of their foreign employes, and sometimes betrayed them into pre- mature essays that did not always end happily. Yet on the whole they showed singularly few symptoms of the umbrage steadily growing in their breasts. Things stood thus when, in 1882, Count Inouye, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Japanese Re- presentative at the Treaty Revision Conference, then sitting in Tokio, laid before the Foreign Delegates a scheme pointing to the complete opening of the Empire, provided that foreigners residing or trading within its territories should be bound by Japanese laws and subject to Japanese tribunals. Already criminal laws of undoubted excellence were in force, and with respect to civil laws, Japan was ready to promise that the codes then in course of compilation should be completed and translated into at least one foreign language before the date fixed for the re- vised treaties to go into operation. Further, she would undertake to employ in the capacity of judges such a number of competent foreign legal experts that in every case where a foreigner was concerned these judges should be in a majority. British influence was then paramount in Japan, and Sir Harry Parkes represented it. A man universally beloved and respected, Sir Harry had done much to enhance his country's prestige in the Orient ; but having been an eye- witness of all JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 437 the changes undergone by Japan during and since the fall of feudalism, familiarity had rendered him unconscious of their magnitude. Just as persons of mature years often remain children in the estima- tion of those who have watched their daily growth, so the new Japan remained always a child in the view of Sir Harry Parkes, who had assisted at its birth and helped to nurse it. No scheme of treaty revision recognising Japan's competence to resume her judicial and tariff autonomy could seem any- thing but premature to him. He might have strengthened and confirmed Great Britain's leader- ship in Japan by taking a sympathetic course ; but his conservatism was unbending, and Japan, hope- less of obtaining the assistance which she would have valued most, threw herself into the arms of Germany. In 1884, Sir Francis Plunkett replaced Sir Harry Parkes at the Court of Japan, and the negotiations were continued, Germany and England acting in apparent concert, but always to the former's advantage. Volumes might be written describing the wonderful labyrinth of proposals and counter proposals advanced by the sixteen delegates ; the perpetual struggles of certain repre- sentatives to assert their influence, of others to save themselves from effacement ; the hopeless entangle- ment of impracticable conditions that grew out of the foreign negotiators' timidity and distrust, and the petty difficulties that blocked the path to any- thing like a broad, statesmanlike solution. Finally, in 1887, Japan discovered that she should be 438 SEAS AND LANDS. obliged to pledge herself not only to frame codes of a certain character, but also to submit them, as well as every subsequent amendment of them, virtually for the approval of foreign Powers ; that for the sake of a few hundred possible foreign suitors, she should have to appoint a greater number of foreign judges than those constituting the whole English bench ; that these judges would be removable by the decision of their own col- leagues alone ; that each nationality looked forward to a voice in their appointment ; and that the whole scheme had been contorted into something which would substitute political bias for the administration of justice, and expose Japan to humiliation less bearable because more deliberate than that she already suffered. Amid a storm of popular excite- ment, she drew back from such a ruinous bargain, and the negotiations were suspended, not to be re- opened until 1889, when a greatly modified scheme, proposed by Count Okuma, was accepted promptly by the United States of America, by Germany, and by Russia. The long-deferred end seemed now in sight. The guarantees required of Japan had been reduced to comparatively insignificant dimensions. They were represented by an engagement, first, that her revised codes should be promulgated, and translated into English two years before the abolition of consular jurisdiction ; secondly, that in the Supreme Court judges of foreign origin should sit in a majority whenever a case affecting foreigners came up for JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 439 hearing. Acceptance of these terms meant the opening of the whole country to foreign trade, travel, and residence. Hitherto Japan had nego- tiated with the sixteen Treaty States en masse, a proceeding which, after fifteen years of essay, had amply proved its own hopelessness. She now approached the Great Powers separately but simul- taneously, and, as we have said, the United States, Germany, and Russia quickly concluded treaties with her. But England hesitated. Partly because international courtesy forbade her to hastily desert a combination of which she had been the original promoter as well as the head ; partly because she valued the union for the sake of the bloodless results formerly achieved by its display of irresistible force, her first impulse was to endeavour to re-cement it. In this she failed. Failure ought, indeed, to have been anticipated, for careful observers had discovered, years before, that Great Britain's treaty colleagues, while willing enough to profit by the convenience of association with her, had not hesitated, as was natural, to place upon her the odium of responsi- bility, and to claim for themselves the credit of more liberal sentiments. It was only necessary that one should break away from the union, the rest were sure to follow. America took the first step, Germany the second, Russia the third, and France would even have preceded Germany had her official routine permitted equal speed. Thus the solidarity of great Powers was reduced to England, Austria, and Italy. Yet even if England had stood alone she could have 440 SEAS AND LANDS. effectually blocked the way, not simply because the magnitude of her interests gave weight to her opposi- tion, but also because every month passing without a settlement brought new complications for the Japanese Government. This latter fact depends on two reasons, which it is essential to understand fully. The first is that, comparatively easy as were the guarantees offered by Japan, one of them had excited public discontent, and was day by day evok- ing bitterer denunciation. The Constitution promul- gated in the spring of 1 889 contained a clause which the people interpreted as conferring on Japanese subjects an exclusive right of property in Japanese civil and military offices. Therefore to appoint aliens to Japanese judgeships would, it was claimed, violate the letter of the Constitution, and to make alienage a condition essential to eligibility would unquestionably violate its spirit. So vehement did the opposition ultimately become that the Govern- ment could not have adhered to this part of the programme. To do so would have been not merely to defy public opinion, but also to take the un- statesmanlike course of opening the country to foreign intercourse under a system unpopular from the outset. The second reason which rendered the delay fatal to success on the proposed lines, was the imminence of parliamentary institutions. The Con- stitution, while reserving the treaty-making power to the Emperor, made the Diet's consent essential to every exercise of legislative authority. The date fixed for the meeting of the first Diet was November JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 441 1890. Unless, therefore, all the treaties could be concluded, ratified, and put into operation before that date, the Government would be obliged to have recourse to the Diet for assistance in carrying out their judicial provisions, and it was quite plain from the temper of the people that the Diet could never be induced to assist in setting up special courts of the kind contemplated. In short, the Bureaucratic Administration of 1889 dared not pledge itself to anything conditional on the consent and co-operation of the Constitutional Administration of 1890. It was thus that England's delay interposed an effectual barrier by, on the one hand, allowing time for the senti- mental opposition of the Japanese nation to mature, and, on the other, fatally shortening the period available to the Government for independent action. Once more, then, in the fall of last year, the negotiations had to be suspended. The Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs resigned. Crippled for life by the attack of one of those fanatics incidental to seasons of keen popular excitement, he carried into his retirement the credit of having, by a dis- play of consummate ability and courage, brought his country within sight of her much-desired goal. Thus two of Japan's greatest statesmen, Count Inouye and Count Okuma, had been sacrificed at the shrine of this apparently, easy problem how to remove from Japan the stigma of semi-isolation ; how to complete the freedom of her foreign intercourse. Who could be induced to step into the breach where two such experts had fallen? 442 SEAS AND LANDS. A short interval of rest ensued. During four years Japanese legislators had been elaborating a scheme for reorganising the law courts ; during four times that period they had been engaged drafting civil and commercial codes, based on the principles of Western jurisprudence. Both of these measures were now consummated. The scheme of reorganised courts was promulgated in February ; the new codes were issued in March. Thus, of the two guarantees forming the basis of the suspended negotiations one, and that by far the more important, was effectually satisfied ; Japan possessed a good system of civil and commercial law, an English version of which might be procured by any one. But the other pro- posed guarantee, namely, the appointment of judges of foreign origin in the Supreme Court, must evi- dently be abandoned altogether. It is almost in- credible that any importance should ever have been attached to this guarantee. For, in the first place, since appeals are carried to the Supreme Court only on questions of law, not on questions of fact, a foreign suitor could not hope to reach that court except under rare circumstances ; in the second place, it may be doubted whether much confidence would be placed in judges thus employed ; and, in the third, to the majority of foreign suitors these judges must of necessity be just as alien as their Japanese colleagues. It was natural that England, eminently practical as she is, should have hesitated to sign any covenant embodying such a shadowy condition ; and, as for the Japanese Government, it JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 443 then learned beyond doubt that no guarantee of the kind would be tolerated by the nation. By slow and painful degrees, therefore, the situa- tion had been simplified until nothing more is needed than a trifling exercise of liberal statesman- ship. Will Great Britain take the final step ? Her waiting policy has made her mistress of the situation once more. In the days of Sir Harry Parkes, and again in the days of Sir Francis Plunkett, she might have earned Japan's perpetual gratitude by practi- cally acknowledging that a country which had sacri- ficed so much in the cause of progress deserved some measure of trust and recognition. But she suffered both opportunities to pass unutilised, so that in 1887 no Power was less respected in proportion to its strength, or less considered in proportion to its interests. Now, however, fortune has placed the ball for the third time at her feet. The Japanese Government returns to her, fully persuaded that, benevolent as may be the intentions of other States, it rests with her alone to solve the problem. Lord Salisbury has to decide whether Japan shall be con- demned to another period of semi-isolation and corre- sponding humiliation, whether her growing ill-feeling against foreign arbitrariness shall be suffered to develop, to the detriment of her civilisation, and to the inconvenience to use no stronger term of his countrymen residing within her borders, or whether all sense of injury shall be removed by treating her as an equal, and allowing her to throw open her whole territories to the commerce of the world. It 444 SEAS AND LANDS. is not a trivial consideration, that of Japan's foreign commerce. In ten years its volume has more than doubled, growing from $60,000,000 in 1879, to $136,000,000 in 1889, and of the latter total nearly one half fell to Great Britain's share alone. This remarkable development has taken place in the teeth of unfavourable conditions. Confined to the narrow limits of the Treaty Ports, and forbidden by law to form partnerships with Japanese, the foreign merchants have been gradually environed by a ring of native monopolists, who absorb the lion's share of the profits and effectually prevent free competi- tion. Only by shrewd, hard toil have British traders managed to hold their own, and it is natural that, on their side also, there should have grown out of such unsatisfactory conditions a feeling of dis- content and distrust. Being imbued, too, with the Occidental's wonted love of his own laws and his own nation's judicial methods, they shrink from the experiment of submitting to Japanese laws and Japanese tribunals. But, however respectable this instinct may be, its indulgence cannot be perpetual. All that foreigners can reasonably expect to find in Japan is a sound system of intelligible laws and a fairly competent judiciary. Both these conditions are already satisfied the former actually, the latter inferentially. We can never fully gauge the com- petence of Japanese judges until we test it practi- cally in their courts. What we know is that, for the past twenty years, numbers of Japanese have been receiving legal education at well-equipped JAPAN AND FOREIGN POWERS. 445 schools and colleges in Japan, and at similar institu- tions in Europe and America ; that these men are now sitting on the Japanese Bench ; and that when- ever they have been required as they are required under the extra-territorial system to adjudicate civil cases in which foreigners are plaintiffs and their own people defendants, they have shown themselves intelligent and impartial, though the imperfections of their country's legal procedure have often involved miscarriages of justice. The laws, in short, not the judges administering them, have proved unsatisfactory, and since the former are now thoroughly amended there are no reasonable grounds for refusing to trust the latter. If England, by an act of liberal and in no sense hazardous statesmanship, helps Japan at this eleventh hour to recover her judicial and tariff autonomy, and to enter the comity of Western nations on equal terms, the consequences will be invaluable to British pres- tige and British influence. If, on the other hand, England again hesitates, not only will Japan's feeling of mortification be intensified into strong resentment, but the chances of a friendly understanding will pro- bably be destroyed. For should this question pass into the hands of the Diet, as it must do unless disposed of before November, there is only too much reason to fear that patient and conciliatory methods having been found fruitless, recourse will be had to the policy of retaliation. By putting an end to the system of passports, and thus confining aliens strictly within treaty limits ; by closing her internal 446 SEAS AND LANDS. posts against foreign correspondence ; by confining the use of her railways and coasting steamers to her own subjects ; and by other methods equally embarrassing, Japan might exercise pressure scarcely tolerable and certain to engender much ill-will. Thus far no disposition of the kind has been shown, but the action of the people's representatives may be very different from that of the prudent and liberal statesmen who now direct affairs. It is not too much to say, therefore, that upon England's decision at this crisis depend at once the re-establishment of her own influence and popularity in Japan and the future character of foreign relations with the only nation in the Orient which has shown itself possessed of the true instinct of civilised progress. YOKOHAMA, JAPAN, May 10, 1890. CHAPTER XXIX. A JAPANESE EXHIBITION. OUR great National Exhibition is now in full glory, visited every day by many thousands of the town and country people of Japan ; and it presents un- doubtedly, even apart from its local and picturesque aspect, many most interesting, artistic, and industrial features. Its buildings are situated at Uyeno, a large wooded park, on rising ground in the north- west quarter of the city, as well known to Tokioites as Hyde Park to Londoners. It is a spot full of stirring historical memories for Japan. The great Shogun lyemitsu erected there in 1625 one of the finest Buddhist temples of the land, which he sur- rounded with numerous smaller but splendid shrines, intended to render this north-west quarter of the city, which is the specially unlucky point, more favourably regarded by the gods. A son of the reigning Emperor was always high priest of this temple, being kept as a convenient person to raise to the throne if the Mikado's party at Ky6to proved troublesome or obstinate. In the last great struggle, which upset the Shogunate, and gave back to the Mikado his Imperial power as well as his dignity, the High Priest of Uyeno, Prince Kita Shira Kawa, 448 SEAS AND LANDS. was actually declared Emperor, and carried to Aidzu, but was afterwards pardoned by the present Mikado, and sent to Germany to study, and is now living in peaceful simplicity near Shidzuoka. At the foot of the leafy hill is a triple bridge, very famous in Japanese story, and then you pass a temple to the Thousand-handed goddess Kwannon, while on the left is the shallow lake called Shinobazu No Ike, which will be covered with lotus flowers in the autumn, and is surrounded with temples and tea- houses. Under the trees may be seen an enormous bronze Buddha, twenty-two feet high, and an old black gateway pierced full of bullet-holes in the great battle of 1868. Long avenues of stone lanterns are here, and a temple to the memory of the Shogun lye Yasu, in which hang pictures of the San-jiu-roJc-Rasen, or " six-and-thirty immortal poets." It is saddening to reflect that you do not know, and that I have now forgotten, the names of this three dozen of deathless bards. In the early spring-time all this fair and famous green eminence was covered with the tinted snow of innumerable cherry trees, so that you walked in the lanes and avenues of Uyeno under a canopy of tenderly-tinted blossoms, filling the air with a fragrance as delicate as their own delicious colour, and for a time transforming the hill into one inter- lacing mass of roseate glory. Then came heavy rains and harsh winds, which tore the dainty trees to pieces at the moment when the city was pre- paring to take its yearly delight in the great festival A JAPANESE EXHIBITION. 449 of Spring. It was a sad disappointment and a serious blow, not only to the pleasure-lovers, but to all the tea-house people and kuruma men, who at the season of the cherry blossoms reap a rich harvest. True, there was one wonderful day, spite of the evil weather, when the wind filled the air with fluttering flakes of pearly white and rose-red leaflets, leaving still on the trees a thick soft roof of lovely blossoms, but carpeting the ground sole- deep with the delicate new downfall of the ruined buds and blossoms. Then the trees gave it all up for the current year, and took to mere foliage, which is now very rich and massive, rounding off the dark green columns of the cryptomerias, and the light green feathers of the bamboo, with this wide-spread- ing spring verdure of the plums and cherries, through high banks of which you approach the now flourish- ing and popular Exhibition. It is a constant dash up and down the hilly road, to the entrance, of jinrikishas, a constant stream up and down on the side walks of town and country people. Here, indeed, you see all Japan the farmers' wives with blue handkerchiefs upon their black hair, and gaiters of grey silk upon their " honourable legs ; " the farmers in blue coats, covered with wild devices in white or red, leading those children who can walk, while the mothers patiently carry, or publicly suckle, the little ones. Students in square caps and red stockings mingle with soldiers in cherry coloured breeches ; sailors clad a la blue-jacket, but with their ship's name in 2 F 450 SEAS AND LANDS. Chinese letters on their cap ; geishas in gold and scarlet, sky-blue and orange, brilliant as butterflies ; demure musumes, dressed more soberly, but still very superbly, with dove-coloured or gold-striped kimono, obi of rich-flowered silk, and snow-white cloven socks, each attended by a maid and carrying an umbrella; children dressed like tiger-moths in all the colours of the rainbow ; immeasurably old women and old men hobbling to see the latest glories of Nippon ; policemen, with swords and spectacles, looking half professor, half soldier; shrill vendors of Japanese newspapers and plans of the Exhibition, with high scarlet caps ; sleek, bald-headed, Buddhist priests ; black and white robed Shinto monks and abbots ; in fact, " the world and his wife " of Japan are there. You take your tickets if you do not carry a complimentary admission card covered with gold chrysanthemums at a little shed outside the gate, where the highest price is but fifteen sen on Sundays, and you get in on Saturdays for three sen, about i^d. The buildings sheltering the Exhibition are of no architectural pretension, being, indeed, mere sheds run up, of planks and paper, to house the varied and, in many cases, very precious things inside. To attempt anything like an enumeration of these is, of course, not my purpose ; indeed, only to walk through all the halls and passages once would give you, it is said, a tramp of fourteen or fifteen miles. For there is something of everything here, and it is a thousand pities, in truth, that Japan did not better A JAPANESE EXHIBITION. 451 understand how to bring over in good time those representative Europeans who would have seen what wonderful things she can make, and would have known how to develop from them new opportunities of commerce. The porcelain, of course, is in many respects marvellous, although for the most part modern. The Japanese potters are to-day working with high intelligence to recover the best secrets of the old days, and though they have not yet quite achieved the splendid colours of the sang de boeuf, and of the dragon's heart, or that wonderful Chinese black which has green and gold in its gloom, yet they have mastered a pale blue under the glaze, which is as lovely as the old azure ever was, and there are treasures here in the way of cups and teapots quite worthy of the land where the tea-leaf might be a national symbol. Of course, there are splendid things also in the line of red and black lacquer, powdered with gold and inlaid with mother- of-pearl and ivory ; amazing screens, embroidered, inlaid, and lacquered; delicate gilded shrines; bronzes of fantastic and fearless design ; carved ivories ; and the richest possible specimens of embossed brocades, with silks and satins, crapes and cottons, woven and dyed with a fancy at once daring and inexhaustible. But in the industrial department what strikes the foreigner most, I think, is the matchless skill of the Japanese in turnery and joinery. There are here ranges after ranges of cabinets and writing-tables, &c., which might have been put together by the carpenters of Queen Mab, so fine and exquisite is 452 SEAS AND LANDS. the fashioning of them, while yet they are solid enough for the hardest service. No strange timber grows in any forest, no out-of-the-way product is found in the earth or sea, which the Japanese craftsman will not press into use, making the tout ensemble a museum of materials. Yet the plainest things please most the hibachi or fire-hoxes, so neat and convenient, with their central copper re- ceptacle for the lighted charcoal, and little drawers and unexpected nests and compartments everywhere ; the tansu and todana, full of the most ingenious contrivances, all made of wood, and put together with amazing exactitude. One would think, indeed, that the Japanese joiner worked with a micrometer, so perfect is the article ; but it is rather his wonder- ful finger and thumb and true eye which produce these faultless specimens of simple construction. The art department has its own interest, but chiefly of a prospective character. In drawing and painting Japan is at present half unconsciously going through a transition stage. She has observed, and silently adopted, the methods of the Western schools in colour, perspective, and even treatment ; nor will it be long before you see in the West oil pictures from Japanese easels, which you will hardly distinguish from second-rate works of French, English, or German ateliers. I think they will especially excel in landscape and architectural painting. But there is one picture here by a well-known artist which marks plainly the epoch of change. It represents the Goddess of Mercy riding on the back of a dragon A JAPANESE EXHIBITION. 453 through the foam and fury of a stormy sea, the sub- ject being intensely Japanese, while the treatment is almost grotesquely and pathetically European. There are not wanting majesty and sublimity in the goddess ; her robes are swept back against her limbs and breasts by the fierce wind, which drives together behind her the seething crests of the sea ; while tongues of fire issue from the mouth and scales of the dragon, whose vast length coils hideously to leeward, green and gold in the ruffle of the sea's green and white. But the great beast, in coming down from the old conventional " Ryo " to the natural and paintable, has parted with all his traditional terror, and is, especially about the head and horns, a very poor, plain, impossible " worm," hardly so imposing as the Griffin at Temple Bar. What is most remarkable is the artist's earnest effort to make it a European picture in drawing and handling, and in the texture and general style. Near at hand hang many similar examples, showing rather the desire to "Westernise" Japanese painting than the power at present to accomplish this. It is much to be wished at such a juncture that the best of the young Japanese artists could go over to the studios of the leading French and English painters in order to understand better than they do to-day the true principles of our modern schools. There are one or two little statuettes here, in wood, bronze, and unglazed porcelain, which show that though sculpture as an art cannot be said to exist yet in Japan, it might soon and successfully 454 SEAS AND LANDS. arise. I noticed especially a dancing-girl deliciously done in bisque, and a figure in pear- wood of a jochu or servant-maid, who drowned herself in a well, having been scolded for losing a plate. Her ghost is rising from the water with soaked garments and with long hair matted by water upon the sad, suffering face, while she counts on her fingers the platters which were the cause of her suicide. The modeller who did this could do greater things. The agricultural and fishery sections are also full of interest. Indeed, the Japanese have little to learn in the science of farming ; their rice and barley fields are models of intelligent culture, and their implements in the highest degree ingenious, cheap, and serviceable. Tobacco, tea, rice, and silk form, of course, the principal exhibits. Of coffee they know nothing, and as for fish, wherever they swim the Japanese can catch them, and the demand is always equal to the supply, for the population really subsists upon fish and rice. At this season there are floating from bamboo poles in front of half the houses in Tokio huge fish made of paper, and brilliantly coloured in purple, scarlet, and blue. These are to celebrate the number of male children in the household, and you can tell how many boys the family boasts by counting the big and little fish, puffed out by the wind, and glittering in the sunshine under a big gilded globe of basket-work. The fish represented is the Koi, which is regarded by the Japanese as a type of courage, perseverance, and fortitude. I asked a A JAPANESE EXHIBITION. 455 Japanese mother why this particular fish was hoisted, and she gave me these two reasons: "The koi," she said, " if he is placed alive on a dish, and cut while living into twenty slices, will not move or betray any pain, and even when red pepper is placed upon his eye, under these cruel circum- stances condescends to give only one slight move- ment while expiring." She also said that when the koi ascends the streams in the autumn, nothing daunts him in the way of rapids and waterfalls, and it is in order to encourage Japanese lads to be as patient and courageous as the koi, that these fish standards are yearly floated. Within the Exhibition you can only get tea and cakes, and you must not smoke, except outside the buildings. Consequently there is a great rush on emerging for the regular restaurants and large tea- houses which throng all round the hill of Uyeno, and even upon its summit, under the great crypto- merias ; and very pleasant it is, after dazzling the eyes with the sight of the beautiful Cloisonne' ware and glittering Kaga porcelains, the lovely silk kimono with landscapes and ducks and storks woven into them, and all the wonders of the show, to drop your shoes and pass into the spotless little apartment of some tea-house looking over the city, and there dine a, la Japonaise, in Japanese society, looking over the vast city in which the lights begin to twinkle. The bill of fare is bright in gold Chinese letters on black lacquer. You choose your dishes do not forget to let "roast eels on rice. " 456 SEAS AND LANDS. figure among them the irresistible unagimeshi and soon the sake-cup, hot and fragrant, goes round, the little lacquered dishes surround you, the musumes kneel and chatter, your Japanese friends discuss the wonders of the show, daintily you ply your chop-sticks amid boiled fish and delicate slices of raw fish, the kinto, or chestnut paste, the salted plums, and pickled peaches, the prawns on cream, and the bean-cakes. Everybody drinks with everybody else, and pretty faces flush a little with the rice-wine, which loosens the tongue and animates the Tokio talk, till the gozen comes, the smoking rice-bowl and the tea, and all the city lamps are lighted. It is time to go ! the kurumas are called, the paper lanterns kindled, and in a light and laughing storm of " mata irrashais," " Come soon again," we quit the Exhibition. AZABU, May 19, 1890. CHAPTER XXX. THE JAPANESE SHAMPOOER. ONE of the most ordinary figures in the Japanese streets and lanes is the Amma-San, or shampooer. By daytime you will see him wending his slow way for he is quite blind through the throng, guiding himself and warning others to keep clear of him, by the bamboo staff which he carries, and with which he constantly touches the ground a little in advance of his footsteps. By night you hear rather than see him, tootling a melancholy note, something like the cry of a plover, upon a little reed flute, which he bears with him. As mentioned above he is blind, and his profession, as one who practises the scien- tific " massage," is the great resource of blind men and women in Japan, who would otherwise prove a burden on their families, but are here a source of support, very often, indeed, amassing wealth, and adding the profession of money-lending to their original vocation. The blind shampooer would not be possible where wheel-traffic existed. His plain- tive cry would be drowned in the uproar of hoofs and wheels, and he himself would be run over a hundred times. But in Tokio there is nothing for him to fear except the jinrikishas, which make no 457 458 SEAS AND LANDS. noise, and which scrupulously avoid colliding with children and the Amma-San. He himself has the quick faculty which the blind display of seeming to see with their ears, and walks without hesitation or danger in the quarter with which he is familiar. In dress and aspect there is nothing to distinguish him except his hands ; but these, it will generally be ob- served, are kept very clean and soft, and his whole appearance is usually neat and respectable. It will probably not be long during a sojourn in Japan before, either for curiosity or actual necessity, you invoke the aid of the Amma-San. There are a good Aiany changes in the Japanese climate, and a great many draughts in Japanese houses, and some day or other what your attendants call " your honour- able limbs" get a touch of stiffness or pain, which will be best removed, they tell you, by the well- established Japanese remedy of the human hand. Accordingly a messenger is despatched to stop a passing Amma-San, or to send for one of good credit residing in the neighbourhood. I myself, having contracted a passing twinge of rheumatism, made very successful experiment in this way, not long ago. But I would not engage a male sham- pooer, and I rather wonder that any person of taste allows a man to pummel and knead him when there are plenty of middle-aged, blind, cleanly, and respect- able women ammas who have softer hands, gentler ways, and are altogether more agreeable as practi- tioners. Accordingly I sent for a skilful lady, named O Kiku San, which means, of course, " Madame THE JAPANESE SHAMPOOER. 459 Chrysanthemum," albeit an extremely different person from the ill-rewarded, but wonderfully well described, heroine of M. Pierre Loti's book. O Kiku San, being introduced to my bedroom, and kneeling down by my side, for I always sleep on the floor in Japan, made the usual graceful salutations, which by this time are so familiar to our ears. With fore- head on the mats she murmurs, " As to the evening." I respond, " As to the evening ; you are welcome." On learning the seat of the malady she begins her treatment, after I have mentioned that she shall receive twice the usual rate of pay that she may work with a better will. You are not inclined to believe, of course, very much at first in the effi- cacy of those small taps from the finger-ends which commence proceedings. But very soon, when your quiet, sightless physician has gained a fair idea, by your exclamations of pain and impatience, where the trouble is really lodged, it is astonishing how you begin to take interest in the operation and to become soothed by it. The Moxa is another method of treatment highly popular in Japan, although the European is not very likely to often avail himself of it. This word, as meaning the actual cautery, is familiar to English medicine, but has been derived, though few people know it, directly from the Japanese. The real word is Mogusa, a contraction of Moe-Rusa, which means the " burning herb," because the leaves of an Artemisia (what we call the " Mugwort ") are employed in the operation. Dried fragments of 460 SEAS AND LANDS. this are rolled into a cone, stuck upon the body in the place affected, set fire to, and then allowed to burn down to the skin like a pastille. This is considered extremely efficacious for all sorts of ills, including fainting fits, nose-bleeding, and even the pains of child-birth, as well as rheumatism, lumbago, &c. You will often see a double row of little scars up and down the spine of your jinrikisha-m&n, or decorating the back of his thighs and calves, and Mr. Chamberlain tells a story of a child who, having set a house on fire, and become thereby liable to the old severe law of the Empire, which condemned a person guilty of arson to be himself burnt alive, was taken to the place of execution, but let off with an unusually severe and solemn dose of the mogusa. There is a third very popular and rather painful treatment adopted by the Japanese, known to us as acu-puncture, and to the Japanese by the word shin-jutsu. This has been practised in Japan ever since the history of the Empire began, and is much believed in as a stimulant and counter-irritant. Dr. Whitney, in his notes on medicine in Japan, de- scribes it as follows: "As practised by the acu- puncturists, the operation consists in perforating the skin and underlying tissues, to a depth, as a rule, not exceeding one-half to three-quarters of an inch, with fine needles of gold, silver, or steel. The form and construction of these needles vary; but, generally speaking, they are several inches long, and of an average diameter of one forty-eighth of THE JAPANESE SHAMPOOER. 461 an inch. Each needle is usually fastened into a handle, which is spirally grooved from end to end. To perform the operation the handle of the needle is held lightly between the thumb and first finger of the left hand, the point resting upon the spot to be punctured. A slight blow is then given upon the head of the instrument with a small mallet, held in the right hand, and the needle is gently twisted until its point has penetrated to the desired depth, where it is left for a few seconds, and then slowly withdrawn, and the skin in the vicinity of the puncture rubbed for a few moments. The number of perforations range from one to twenty, and they are usually made in the skin of the abdomen, although other portions of the body are not unfre- quently punctured." The Japanese suffer from many special diseases due to a too exclusive diet on fish and rice, and to the want of exercise especially from indigestion ; but they escape a great many by their exquisite personal cleanliness. The "tub" is more of an institution in Japan than in England itself, and even as far back as the beginning of Japanese history we find the god Izanagi bathing himself every morning. Every fairly large house in Tokio has its own bath- room ; but besides this there are no less than 800 baths in the city of Tokio, where 300,000 persons bathe daily at a cost per head of one sen three rin, or about a halfpenny. A reduction of three rin is made for children. They take their baths at a very high temperature about 1 10 degrees Fahrenheit 462 SEAS AND LANDS. and come out of them as red as lobsters ; but there appears to be no fear whatever of catching cold. Thus, though the Japanese wear no undeiiinen, except the loin-cloth, fundoshi, of the men, and the koshi make and imogi of the women, a Japanese crowd is the sweetest and least objectionable in the world ; indeed, the natural odour of the people is not unlike that of the leaf of the lemon geranium. They have an especial passion for the hot mineral springs with which the country abounds, and at some places, such as Kawanaka, in the province of Jonshu, there are bathers who will stay in the water for a whole week at a time, with a stone in their laps to keep them from floating in their sleep ! One curious but imaginary malady in this country not the less real on account of its being fanciful quite commonly seen in the hospitals, especially among women of the lower classes, is kitsune-isuki, or " possession by foxes." The fox is the magic beast par excellence of the land, and an hysterical woman will often believe that she is inhabited by a demon beast of this description. The idea is that the fox enters the body through the breast, by the eyes, or even between the finger-nails and the flesh, and resides there, the person possessed knowing what the fox inside says and thinks, and even main- taining long conversations with him, the fox speak- ing in a different voice from her own. The priests of the Nicheren sects of Buddhists are very success- ful expellers of foxes. The fox inside, being seri- ously adjured by prayers and spells, mentions what THE JAPANESE SHAMPOOER. 463 cakes and other offerings he will accept to quit his victim ; and these having been duly laid on the altar of the temple, the fox generally takes himself " honourably " off, and the patient recovers. But as a matter of fact Japan has accepted modern and scientific medicine, and many of the native Japanese practitioners are accomplished and successful gentlemen, employing all modern methods and resources. In one native household where I have the privilege of entry a lady of the family lay very unwell, with a sort of hysterical indigestion. Her people had administered in vain a large selection of popular Japanese nostrums, many of them very nasty, and none, in this case at least, at all efficacious. The young lady herself, as a last and sovereign resort, called for and swallowed a small picture of Buddha on a piece of soft paper, about as large as a postage stamp. She was a little vexed because I, with all my natural respect for the great promulgator of the " Light of Asia," was disinclined to believe that the sacred engraving of the Tatha-gata could do her the slightest good. Severe spasms of pain, with constant sleeplessness, pointed to the necessity of a little hypodermic injection of morphia, which I advised, and the Isha-san was accordingly sent for, and told to bring the syringe. A Japanese girl is too much accustomed from youth to the moxa and the needle to mind the little steel point. The doctor came, and, before kneeling at the side of the patient, sipped his cup of tea, and made the usual necessary remarks about the " honourable 464 SEAS AND LANDS. weather" and our " honourable healths." He took the same view as I about the hysterical pains and the insomnia, whereupon the silken sleeve of the kimono was rolled back, the shapely brown arm was bared, and with a little exclamation from the gentle sufferer of "Ah! setsunai! setsunai!" the divine anodyne was injected. Then the soft black eyes were soon closed in prolonged slumber, the pains disappeared by the next morning, and O Haru San was playing the samisen when I called again, in her perfect health and spirits. AZABU, June 10, 1890. 2 C. CHAPTER XXXI. A DAY IN FLOWERLAND. MY Japanese fellow-citizens love dearly a day in the country. They would make the fortune of ex- cursion trains and of holiday contractors, if such things were established here. They seize every opportunity to go for little expeditions to temples, shrines, and famous points of view ; but, most of all, Flora, Goddess of Spring, helps them, by pro- viding month after month, and indeed almost week by week, some new national flower, coming suddenly into blossom. Thus even our own little garden has marked the progress of the year by a pretty natural calendar of blooms. We had, first of all, the autumn and winter chrysanthemums kiku; then, almost in the middle of the frost, the camellia, tsubaki, came out, with rose-coloured or rosy-white flowers. The single variety of this beautiful plant, however, is not very popular with the Japanese, because the red blossoms fall off entire, and painfully remind people here of amputated heads. Before the winter was gone the early plum and cherry whitened our hill- sides with the fragrant snow of their blossoms ; but the weather was very cruel, and swept away, with rain and wind, the best glory of that wonderful 467 468 SEAS AND LANDS. display. The tree-peony (botan} and the lovely scarlet leaves of the budding maples carried us through April into May, for the Japanese, be it understood, include all brightly -coloured leaves under the general name of " flowers " (hana). The first week in May was everywhere embellished with the lilac-and-white clusters of the wistaria ; we our- selves boasted the possession of a bower which for a whole week was roofed thick with the delicate racemes of this beautiful climber, shutting the sun out by a screen of soft colour and fragrance, and constantly musical with countless bees. About the same time the azaleas lighted with all sorts of hues our own garden and those around us, as well as the country generally. We had here in Azabu, encircling our little artificial lake, a score of azalea bushes, which burst suddenly into masses of blood- red bloom, as if they had been flames lighted round the water. I have not mentioned the ilexes, with wax-white flowers ; the purple and white magnolias, the Cleyera, sacred to the sun-goddess ; the red berries of the aucuba ( the Japanese name from which you take that is Awoki ba ! ) ; the yellow valerium, which the Japanese call Nina meshi " court lady's dress " ; the Asarum, which has given its leaf as a badge to the great Tokugawa Shoguns ; and all the beautiful lilies of the country now coming into season, many of them being quite peculiar to Japan. I am ashamed to say that we have been eating lately at every Japanese lunch or dinner boiled bulbs of the lily. They are uncommonly A DAY IN FLOWERLAND. 469 nice, and far superior in flavour and delicacy to any artichoke ; but it is a very serious thing for the sincere lover of flowers to trifle with his chop- sticks over the soft, sweet flakes of a root which would have produced the beautiful rose-hued blooms of the Lilium japonicum, the glorious petals of the Lilium Auratum, the deep orange splendours of the Lilium elegans, or the gold cup, jewelled with agate spots, of the hirado yuri. If there be such a crime as floricide we have all been guilty of it latterly. Now it is the time for the irises, which suddenly come into full glory in many a pool and swamp near the capital, and furnish excuses for innumerable outings. Among many spots where the beautiful sweet flag can be seen in all her splendour, there is one in particular, called Hori-kiri, which is a very popular resort. I repaired thither yesterday, with three or four Japanese friends, on a lovely day of our early summer, and a little sketch of those " eight hours by the river-side" may serve to convey a general idea of a Nippon holiday. We were economical, and Hori-kiri was afar off, so it was determined to proceed thither by easy and inexpensive stages. We walk accordingly down from Azabu through the Kuboi-cho to Shim-bashi. The streets are brighter than usual, because the people, if they wear anything at all, have donned their light summer kimono. The women especially, in bright, gay-coloured garments of cotton and crdpe, tied with an obi of glancing silk, look as cool and fresh as ice-creams. Many Kori-midzu shops have 470 SEAS AND LANDS. been newly opened establishments where they grate up ice into a tumbler and sell it for a farthing ; and such is the national simplicity and sobriety of taste that nobody wants any flavour or liquor put into this refreshment. The fan shops, scarcely to be seen in the winter, have now burst forth like butterflies into many-tinted glory, and everybody carries a fan, the women the unfolding uchiwa, the men the ogi, which folds. The roads are full of lively-coloured paper umbrellas, but the great fashion now with Japanese ladies is to carry a European parasol or sunshade of the gingham type. Everybody waters the road before his door with a little wooden scoop, and coming round a corner abruptly some of us receive a slight unintended sprinkling. Overwhelmed with regret and self-blame, and devoured with remorse is the akindo the merchant ; he brings clean paper to dry our skirts, and calls himself bad names in gentle Japanese ; but we console him by saying, " O tagai de gozarimas"- "It is the honourable mutuality"- in other words, " It was our fault as much as yours." So we part friends. Thejinrikisha-men have stripped as much as the law allows them for their trying work, and disclose the most extraordinary patterns tattooed on their brown flesh. One who presses us very much to ride might almost have been styled the "Illustrated Tokio News;" he had upon his person so many dragons, stars, incidents of his own and of the national history, and other devices. At the Shimbashi end of the Ginza, the chief street of Tokio, our party of five mount the tram- A DAY IN FLOWERLAND. 471 car, which will take us for something very small to Asakusa. A Buddhist priest and six or eight of the common people also enter. All but the priest begin to smoke little brass or silver pipes, and the con- ductor, who wears a basin hat and red stockings, supplies us all round with a light. The conversa- tion turns upon the terribly high price of rice kome which is thirteen yen the koku at present, instead of being but seven or eight, as in ordinary times. The consequence is very serious distress among the poor, until the new rice, which is now covering the country with green, comes into the market. The European residents, led by the Arch- deacon of Tokio, are doing what they can to assist their indigent neighbours, and I am myself to give a reading in the " Hall of the Cry of the Stag," which may, I trust, help to fill some rice-pots in our quarter. After a long ride down the Ginza and over Nihombashi, or " Japan bridge," from which ancient structure all the roads to the empire are measured, we descend near the great temple of Asakusa, since our ladies have a purchase or two to make, and a prayer to offer at the famous shrine. We walk up through the long row of booths leading to the temple steps, and under the great gate guarded by the two red wooden giants. On the left is the shrine of Jizo, the helper of those in trouble, of travellers, and pregnant women ; together with some prayer-wheels and places where you buy grain for the innumerable sacred pigeons, and salt and incense for offerings. 472 SEAS AND LANDS. Near at hand is a stall where expectant mothers may purchase tickets to tell them whether a child about to be born will be a boy or girl. On the right a great red five-storeyed pagoda soars aloft sacred to the "five Buddhas of contemplation," and there is a rinzo, or revolving library, where for eight rin you may twist round all the 6771 volumes of the Buddhist scriptures. Do not say you have no desire to make all this literature revolve ! Get some one to read you the ticket over the door, which says, " So numerous are the holy books that no one can read them all through, but equal to his merit who has read them is that of him who causes them here to turn three times on the stone lotus. He will have long years and happiness, and will escape many disasters of life." Near at hand is a little shrine, where you can learn your fortune in a peculiar way. You write your desire on a slip of paper, attach it to the wire grating, and then pull off and read any one of the numerous slips which votaries before you have affixed there. You find your answer in the phrase- ology of that. It is a religious variant of the game of "cross questions and crooked answers." Ascend- ing the temple-steps, my Japanese friends pull the rope which summons the attention of Heaven, and make their brief supplications. Then we turn down a by-street towards the great iron bridge which crosses the Sumida river, and on our way join in the hunt of a brown weasel, the itachi, who gets his living in Tokio by himself chasing rats. The broad river, which runs through the city into the Gulf of A DAY IN FLOWERLAND. 473 Yeddo, is lively with innumerable rice-boats and small junks, drifting with square sails before the wind. At the foot of the bridge there is a jin- rikisha stand, and the kuruma men, guessing our business, say, "Shobu?" "Are you going to the irises?" Then ensue solemn negotiations, for the Japanese count their sen and make contracts when they ride ; but everything being amicably concluded, we mount, and are bowled away down the cherry- tree avenue of Mukojima, extending for a mile and a half along the river bank. In the season of flowers this avenue is an interminable vista of silver and roseate beauty, and for days together the entire road is carpeted with the pink snow of the dropping blossoms. Now it is merely green and shady, lined with many tea-sheds and villas, having at the end of it the little temple of Mmewaka, the child of a noble house, who died on this spot, earned off by a slave merchant. His mother seeking him found the villagers burying his body here, but he appeared to her under the form of a weeping willow tree, which still grows in the place, and if it rains on March 15, his memorial day, the folks call the rain-drops from the tree " Mmewaka's tears." We turn presently from the river bank, wheeling along narrow paths between rice fields and marshy farms, where the young rice plants are growing green in the water, and great bushes of hydrangea, with pale blue blossoms, beautify the ride. Clumps of irises shoot up in many little private gardens, but the sight of sights is reserved for the moment 474 SEAS AND LANDS. when our kurumas wheel sharply round under the gateway of an enclosure and draw up, among a great many other similar vehicles, in front of a Japanese inn overlooking grounds of two or three acres in extent. These grounds are diversified in the usual style by little hillocks and clumps of dwarf trees, amid which are perched several small supplementary buildings, where visitors may rest and take refreshment. One of these is allotted to our party. We remove our shoes, ascend the stone steps, and, seated on the mats while tea is being brought and preparations are being made for our meal, survey the scene of beauty under our eyes. Two large pools of water are full of the sweetfiag, Acorus Calamus, blossoming in full perfection, and with a range of colours between snowy white and white touched with rose and lilac, through every tint of royal purple, rich blues, mauve, madder, lilac, magenta, and pink, to an almost black violet. Here and there are blooms of deep gold, belonging to a kindred species, the general effect being in a lavish degree lovely and bewitching ; and we sit on the mats more absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful Ayame than busy with our chopsticks or the little cups of fish soup, stewed lily roots, rice, and sake with which we are quickly sur- rounded. The individual blossoms are magnificent in size and glorious in colour. We hold a long discussion as to which must be called the most lovely, and finish by adjudging the palm to the pearl-white flag with the golden heart and streaks A DAY IN FLOWERLAND. 475 of pale blue. No wonder that the Japanese call their daughters by the name of this fair national flower, " O Ayame San." When we have paid our kanjd, and rise to leave, they bring us a bundle of iris buds, cut with long stalks, and rolled up neatly in matting, to put in water on our return, as well as a fan for each individual, with an iris flower painted on it, and the name " Hori-Kiri," which after all only means the place of " ditch cutting." Our kurumas are wheeled up, we trundle back in the cool evening to Azuma Bridge, and thence make our way, a little tired and hot, but very well pleased, to the shades of Azabu. AZABU, June 20, 1890. CHAPTER XXXII. A JAPANESE HEALTH RESOKT. ABOUT fifty miles away from Yokohama, along the sea-shore, and then by a sharp turn into the high- lands which are grouped around Fuji-San, lies em- bosomed the lovely and salubrious Japanese health resort, whence I am writing this. Fifteen hundred feet above the Pacific and the hot plains, we have escaped hither, for a time, shunning the now some- what sultry weather of the capital and its ubiquitous mosquitoes, which are more bloodthirsty and importu- nate in Tokio than anywhere. The Ka, bred in the rice-fields and ditches of Nippon, is truly a most relentless and insatiable little pest, against which natives and foreigners equally defend themselves with kaya or nets of green muslin, made either large enough to cover a European four-poster, or small enough to place over a sleeping baby. At this season of the year you may indeed see hundreds of tiny brown Japanese infants sleeping, stark naked, beneath what looks like a green meat-safe, where the flies and mosquitoes cannot get at them. Not only the babies, moreover, but their fathers, mothers, " sisters, cousins, and aunts," and the Japanese world in general, largely discard clothing as the July heats 476 A JAPANESE HEALTH RESORT. 477 come on ; and, in the country especially, one sees at this time more of the people in a very literal sense than during the cooler weather. One result is to disclose the really splendid illustrations with which a great many of the men are adorned by the tattooer. The jinrikisha pullers in particular are ofttimes gor- geously pictorial from nape to heel, and you may study for an hour the volutes, arabesques, flowers, gods, dragons, and poetical inscriptions on the back of your coolie as you bowl along, without exhausting the wealth of design and colouring upon the saffron surface of his skin. The journey hither from Yokohama leads by rail- way through interminable rice fields lying between the hills and the sea, all the square patches now "green as grass" with the sprouting roots of the ine. Last year Inare, the deity of the rice plant who has the fox for his attendant gave Japan a bad harvest, and the poor are greatly suffering in consequence. But this year all looks well for a bumper crop, and the purple and silver of the iris and lily clumps everywhere at present blossoming fringe verdant squares of exuberant promised plenty, where the great dragon-flies buzz, and the frogs croak all day long. A run of two hours brings you past Kamakura, the region of the old glories of the warlike house which ruled Japan from 1192 A.D. to the middle of the fifteenth century past Enoshima, the ever-beautiful " Isle of Dragons," to Kodzn, where you take a tramcar, and bump through the town of Odawara to Yumoto village, 478 SEAS AND LANDS. whence the ascent to Miyanoshita commences. The ladies and the luggage ride up the three miles of hilly road in kuruma drawn by two men, ni-nim-biki. The gentlemen, glad of a little rural walk after the hot streets of Tokio, breast the ascent on foot. We reach Miyanoshita just as the lights begin to twinkle in the windows of the two hotels which receive the innumerable visitors to this green and pleasant glen. A hot spring, slightly mineral, has created Miyano- shita, affording perpetual and pleasant bathing ; and the air, whether it breathes from the sea below or from the thickly-wooded hills above, is always fresh and pleasant. To inhale that air, and to bathe in the soft waters heated for you in the subterranean furnaces, is the main business of life in this hill village. The only industry of the place, apart from guides, tea-houses, and waiting musumes, is the manufacture of all kinds of small articles from the wood of the various timber trees growing on the hills around. Some of these are of incredible ingenuity in construction and neatness of finish, making the most elaborate work of Tunbridge Wells utterly commonplace. Many of the woods employed, such as the camphor, the ivy, the kaki, kari, and sendan, are of great beauty, and there seems to be almost nothing that a Japan turner cannot produce from them. He sells you, for a few sen, a box of ivy wood delicately grained and polished, containing a dozen lovely little saucers of the same material ; or a lunch-box which folds into next to nothing until you want A JAPANESE HEALTH RESORT. 479 it, and then expands into a complete and hand- some table service. Sellers of photographs are also numerous, and softly importunate, for the Japanese have become very skilful with the camera. When you have purchased all the photographs and wooden nicknacks which you desire, the next thing is to organise excursions into the wild and beautiful wilderness of mountains everywhere surrounding you. These must be performed either on foot or in chairs lashed on bamboo poles, and carried upon the shoulders of four of the sturdy hill-men of the district. The paths are very steep and narrow, and the foothold often merely the loose stones of a mountain stream. Yet the sturdy Ninsoku trudge along, up hill and down dale, in their sandals of rope, apparently insensible to fatigue, or sufficiently refreshed from time to time by a cup of pale tea and a sugar biscuit, and willingly accepting fifty sen, or about eighteenpence, for a tremendous day's work. With a thin blue calico coat, a blue hand- kerchief tied round the close-cropped head, and their small brass tobacco pipes stuck in their girdles, they chatter gaily as they trot along under the bamboo poles, shifting these every now and then from shoulder to shoulder with a little harmonious murmur of " Go-issho," which means " at the same honourable time," i.e., " all together, boys." Arrived at the tea-house, they patiently pick from their legs the leeches which have fastened there in the wet and narrow forest paths, wipe the profuse perspira- tion from their brown necks, smoke a pipe or two, 480 SEAS AND LANDS. and slowly sip a cup of the " honourable hot tea," and are then ready to trudge on again for another ri under their heavy burdens. Charming and instructive beyond description are some of the expeditions which may thus be under- taken from Miyanoshita as a centre, the hills con- taining all sorts of natural wonders, as well as being of wonderful beauty in regard of scenery. We made two out of many favourite explorations yesterday and the day before ; on the first occasion to the mountain lake of Hakone, on the second to no less formidably- named a spot than "the Great Hell" O Jigoku. The general character of the country being the same, I will make one description serve for the impressions of the two journeys. The Hakone mountains are for the most part intensely green in aspect, " darkly, deeply, beauti- fully green " of a green to make an artist despair, it is so magnificently monotonous, and beyond imita- tion by the palette. This results principally from the long bamboo grass everywhere growing over the highland country, which, though it rises to the height of eight or ten feet, presents the appearance of an unbroken verdant mantle of herbage rolling in light waves before the wind. The trees chiefly beech, fir of various kinds, and oak grow at one time sparsely, at another in extensive groves, from the jungle of the dwarf bamboo ; intermixed with which are a few inconspicuous wild flowers white andromedas and spiraeas, yellow lilies, wild hy- drangea, dog roses, and the Canterbury bell. Little A JAPANESE HEALTH RESORT. 481 or no animal life is to be seen ; the cover seems too dense for four-footed creatures, but on the less wooded mountains the fox and badger exist, and there are deer, wild boar, and monkeys of a single species, to be found not far off. A lark almost exactly identical with the English species sings the familiar carol as we pass, and an oriole, which flutes very sweetly, is seen and heard ; but the HAKONE LAKE. general silence of the mountains is remarkable and almost unbroken, except by the noise of streams everywhere descending. Some of these smoke in the cool hillside air, and discolour the stones with sulphurous or mineral deposits, notably at Ko-ji- go-ku, near to Ashi-no-yu, where some of us en- joyed the luxury of hot sulphur baths, and found 2 H 482 SEAS AND LANDS. them immensely refreshing in the middle of a long walk. The central spot, however, for witnessing this kind of phenomenon is at the " Great Hell " itself, near to the pass of O Tomi Toge, from which a glorious view is obtained of the ever wonderful Fuji-San. There was nothing to indicate that we were approaching a spot to justify the name given to this place, except the sudden appearance of many large dead trees, which had been killed by the fatal breath emanating from the solfataras near. The hillside at large spreads on either hand as fair and green as before, with waving bamboo grass and silvery flowers of the deutzia, and white bells of the Japan anemone. The earliest intimation was by the nostrils, which become abruptly aware of odours distinctly infernal ; and on reaching a solitary farmhouse you come in sight of a torrent, running over black and speckled rocks, on a bed yellow as the rind of an orange. The ladies must now leave their chairs and toil by a steep ascent round a shoulder of the valley, from which issues this Japanese Styx ; and by a perilous and broken path, winding now through the thickets, now along the brink of a crumbling precipice, we come suddenly in sight of a gully, destitute of every shred of vegetation, and hideous with all the Cocytian colours associated with flame and smoke, death and desola- tion, ruin and ravage. It is a corner of the world abandoned to despair a mountain heart on fire which one beholds ; a nook of nature whence every- thing lovely and living has been banished to give A JAPANESE HEALTH RESORT. 483 vent to the secret forces of the under world. The earth all around is poisoned and parti-coloured with livid blotches and gangrenes ; the rocks are crusted with a leprous tetter ; pimples and ulcers of purple and black and yellow break out from the level spaces. Some of these are alive with an evil activity, and hiss and fume and bubble, emitting jets of fat yellow and green smoke, with now and then a crackling noise when the crust sinks in, to open by-and-by at another black and yellow gash in the diseased ground. It is not safe even to stand near the melancholy amphitheatre where reek these caldrons of Acheron. To pass along the black edge of the stream itself and into this ghastly corry would be rash in the extreme, for no one knows where the surface may not yield, and suddenly plunge the foot or limb into a bath of boiling sulphur. A lady of our acquaintance was severely burned here some time ago, and a Russian officer lost his life in the treacherous morass of flame. I am requested by an amiable and charming young lady of our party to inscribe upon her bamboo staff the Japanese name of the place which she will certainly never visit again together with some suit- able record. Sitting out of reach of the winds from Hades, under a great cryptomeria, blasted by its neighbourhood, I carve on the Japanese alpenstock a verse which she means to preserve : " Staff, which to Jig6ku went, Good news to Sinners tell ; Demons may climb to Paradise, Now Angels walk to Hell." 484 SEAS AND LANDS. And yet, just over the ridge, spreads a scene as beautiful as that just quitted is forbidding. On the slopes of the O Tomi Pass box-trees and the milky- blossomed asemi, with the pines and bamboos, the azaleas and lilies, make the mountain fair and glad again ; and Fuji-San is seen towering up in perfect beauty at the end of the vast valley. The snow is almost all gone from the Lady of Mountains. Just here and there are visible, if I may quote my own new poem, the " Light of the World " : " Dark hollows where sad winter hides away From summer, with the snows still in her lap." By another path the matchless mount may be seen looking down upon the deep waters of Hakone a great lake of unknown depth, and perpetual coldness, lying two thousand feet above the sea. Hakone Lake has for its Japanese name Yoshi-no-Midzu- Umi, or the " water of the reeds," and is a very beautiful highland sea, the abode, it is said, of supernatural beings, till a Buddhist priest penetrated these recesses and gave to the world knowledge and possession of lovely and cool Hakone. We drink to the pious memory of Mangwan Shonin as we sit in the upper gallery of the tea-house looking over the rolling blue wavelets of the lake. Close by Japanese woodmen are cutting fir trees into thin boards, to make ori, the boxes in which sweetmeats and cakes are presented. We return in drenching rain, but well rewarded for this and for all our exertions by the splendid scenery and the countless A JAPANESE HEALTH RESORT 485 objects of interest on the road. Perhaps it would not have rained if we had remembered to put some stones in the lap of the great rock image of Jizo, whom we passed in accomplishing the ascent. He is the god of travellers and the protector of children, and the correct thing is to pay him the little atten- tion alluded to. As we wend homewards through the picturesque village of Kiga, we stop to look again at the wonderful fish in the gardens of a tea- house near at hand. Swimming about in a pool under a little waterfall there are exhibited some hundreds of variegated carp the Japanese Koi which are of every imaginable brilliancy of colour purple, russet, citron, saffron, orange, rose-red, gold, and silver. They are tamer than any pigeons, and come voraciously to the bank to be fed, scrambling for slices of bean-cake, and putting their gold and brown noses high out of the water in their struggles to secure the morsel. When a piece of cake falls on the dry rock, near the water, they try to throw themselves on shore, and even use their fins for legs in their eagerness to obtain the prize. The fish in the opening story of the "Arabian Nights," who were coloured blue, yellow, white, and red, and who talked in the frying-pan, could not have been more marvellous in hue, and certainly not more intelligent. MlYANOSHlTA, JAPAN, July I, 1890. CHAPTER XXXIII. THE DAY OF THE DEAD IN JAPAN. TO-DAY and to-morrow we celebrate in Tokio, and all over Dai Nippon, the Bon Matsuri, or "Festival of the Dead." It is the Japanese Jour des Morts, and for many evenings past the Ginza and other principal streets have been filled with little stalls planted on the side of the pavement, where they sell the articles most in vogue for the due observance of this national occasion. The leading idea is that the Dead or a vast number of them come back to this life during the forty- eight hours about to elapse. And, truly, it is just the season when, if you had lived your life in Japan, you would like to return and see the fair and quiet country once again. Summer has come upon us in all its golden glory ; the land is bathed day after day, and from dawn until dusk, in a flood of brilliant sunshine, which is melting the last streaks of snow from the brow of Fuji-San, and making the trees and the crops burst into such vividness of growth that the islands are one green garden. Out of doors work is half suspended, or conducted only by kuruma-men and coolies, stripped to the skin. In the bazaars, the shops THE DAY OF THE DEAD IN JAPAN. 487 which attract most custom are those where they sell kuri-mizu, tumblers of ice ground into flakes upon a steel plane. None but the lightest garments are worn by the most prudish and particular, the children go frankly bare, and in the house a kimono of figured-cotton or gauze, drawn round the loins with a wisp of gay silk, is about all which the Japanese dames and damsels put on. Shoji and amado being taken down, every house is as open as a box, with only a bottom and a top ; and the breeze, if there be any, plays freely and welcomely through back and front. The crows seem to gasp at noon in the hot air, in which large and splendid butterflies and blue-bodied dragon-flies disport by myriads, while for flowers we have all sorts of lilies, some late irises, phlox, pomegranate, and the open- ing blossoms of the lotus, which is grown everywhere for food, as well as beauty. Persons of leisure are mostly gone into the hills, where it is cool to Ikao, Nikko, Miyanoshita, Hakone, and such like places of refuge ; all the more hastily because the cholera is very severely epidemic at Nagasaki, and is pretty sure to come here sooner or later. But we like Tokio, and have grown attached to the life of our quarter ; and, not being afraid either of the heat or the cholera, are waiting for the last white patch of snow to disappear from the summit of Fuji-San, when we hope to be among the first of the pilgrims who will ascend her stately sides, and get our clothes stamped with the coveted mark of those who have touched the crown of the Queen of Mountains. 488 SEAS AND LANDS. At such a time, I say, it is very natural that de- ceased persons of taste and patriotism should desire to revisit Japan, especially since, being disembodied, it is indifferent to them that the thermometer stands at 94 Fahrenheit. The common opinion, conse- crated by ages of simple faith, is that they do return at this season in every year, and must be received and entertained with becoming empressement. For this cause the little stalls have swarmed along the side-walks, loaded with thin canes of the bamboo and osier, bundles of flowers and leaves, bunches of refuse hemp, cucumbers, egg-plant fruit, and lanterns of square shape, white and coloured. All these which the people buy by myriads are symbolical in the approaching solemnities if anything can be called solemn connected with religion in Japan. The attitude of this people towards the supernatural has been described as a mixture of " fear and fun " I should rather call it one of "politeness towards possibilities." When I asked a very intelligent Japanese lady, who was investing in articles for the Bon Matsuri, whether she really believed in Emma San, the Judge of men in Hades, and in the return of departed spirits to their houses, she said, "You have told me before that Emma San is only the Indian Yama, the Regent of the Dead, introduced into Japan ; and as for the departed, who are still so dear to us, I believe they come back Jcokoro no naka ni (into the middle of our hearts), but not taku no naka ni (into the midst of our houses). Yet it is right to do what all the neigh- THE DAY OF THE DEAD IN JAPAN. 489 hours do, and to be kind to the dead if they should come; therefore I shall light my lanterns and go to say my prayers at Shiba." Undoubtedly the common folk have a sincere belief in the old fables, and quite think that Shodzaka no Bdba, the hag of hell, waits on the brink of the Japanese Styx to strip newly-arrived souls of their earthly coverings. GRAVE Or KO-MDRASAKI. So, as a matter of faith, or of habit, everybody takes part in the Bon Matsuri, and is now engaged in lighting up the cemeteries, and putting white or coloured lanterns in the doorways or mado of the houses. The white lanterns are to guide home souls of friends recently deceased ; the coloured lanterns are for the assistance of spirits less newly departed. 490 SEAS AND LANDS. The common idea is that the disembodied anima has to make a journey of 3,600,000,000 ri to the other world, and as a ri equals i\ miles, this is a very considerable distance to travel. Accordingly, on arrival, the souls shall find bunches of tow burning and lights kindled at their well-known door, and little trays of egg-plant fruit and rice and cucum- ber within, and their tombstones also illuminated, in case they wish to see whether the tobd were all duly placed, and the headstone set up lovingly and faithfully with their Kaimio name upon it, for it is the custom here to give the dead a new title, Kurina generally very poetical and compli- mentary. By the seaside, as at Nagasaki where now, alas ! people are dying fifty a day of cholera they build little boats of the canes and reeds, and launch them loaded with rice, egg-fruit, and cucum- ber, and the souls embark, on their return journey, upon these. Here we do it on the Sumida river, and when the little lamp goes out, by wind or immersion, the Sayonara is pronounced, and the friendly spirit has reached its destination. The canes of hemp employed are termed ogara, the kindly dismissal of the shadowy visitors okuri- dashi, the fires lighted at the door mukaibi. If it were true, it would be an interesting anni- versary indeed, an English poet has written some lines which suit well the Bon Matsuri : " I heard the dogs bark in the midst of the Night, And went to the window to see the sight ; All the Dead that ever I knew Coming, one by one and two by two.'' THE DAY OF THE DEAD IN JAPAN. 491 I do not gather that the Japanese common people have the least fear of their revenants. Rather the contrary ! The grace of their life extends to the unknown and unknowable, and their fancies on this head are all pretty and tender. If one of the great black-and-crimson or green-and-silver butterflies comes into a house to-day, sugar is set for it " it is certainly the soul of ojtsan or obdsan, of grandpapa or grandmamma ! " The Chinese have the same idea and the same festival, and both came, probably, from India, where the Sraddha the celebration of the Death-day is a most established ceremony. In the Sanskrit Mahdbhdrata occurs a splendid passage, where, after the great battle, all the slain warriors come up out of the river and hold a night-long feast with the victors and survivors, departing again when the "wolfs-tail" comes into the sky and the jungle- cocks crow. The soft and pleasant temper of Japan has given graces to the old superstitions. They worship and celebrate, but seem to say and think with Shelley : " It is a pleasant creed, and yet Modest, if one considers it ; To think that Death itself must be, Like all tilings else, a mockery." My charming neighbour, the daughter of our land- lord, O Fuku San " the Honourable Miss Good Fortune " has just called in to give me fresh and more accurate particulars about the Jour des Marts. She says parents and ancestors are wor- shipped during three days, at this time. Shrines of 492 SEAS AND LANDS. Buddha are carefully cleansed, and all things apper- taining to them put in order. The little red earthen- ware pans, everywhere sold and bought, are to hold the oil and wick for the Death Lamps. The bundles of grass are styled kusaichi. The 1 5th (that is to-day) bears the title of Chugen, the day of good and blessing. No fish is eaten now, and ogara, the stripped hemp-stalks, and hemp refuse, will again be burned to-night. The i6th (to-morrow) is called Sai-nichi. Servants and apprentices get leave of absence and gifts of money, and put on new dresses to visit friends and parents, which is termed Yadori. On that last day of the " Feast of Lanterns," for such it may be called, offerings are made to Emma- San, the dread Deity of the Under- world, and prayers uttered for the dead and living. AZABU, July 15, 1890. CHAPTER XXXIV. A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY. A LOVE-STORY will outlive the memory of long wars and great princes. There exists a proof of this in a little village, which I recently visited, not far from Tokio. The village is named Meguro, and lies about three miles from the capital (rather over a ri), amid bamboo groves and clumps of wild camellias, on the banks of a stream called the Furu Kawa, which runs into the Sumida. Here lie buried, near the temple of Fudo-Sama, Shirai Gompachi and Ko-Murasaki, his beautiful mistress. And although it is 230 years since these lovers were laid there together under the bamboos, their memory remains still as green as the leaves that flutter above them. Everybody, hereabouts, knows their story ; every one can relate it to you with the minutest particulars ; every one, sooner or later, repairs to their grave to burn a stick of incense there, and afterwards to sit in the tea-house by the pool of white lotus and feed the tame carp with pink and green biscuits, while meditating, each in his own way, upon what Shakespeare says : " Golden boys and girls all must Consign to this, and conie to dust." 493 494 SEAS AND LANDS. Since, moreover, the tale illustrates bygone Japanese manners, and the place itself is pretty enough to deserve description, I will briefly recount the more or less moving narrative of the loves of Gornpachi and Ko-Murasaki, the meaning of this name being " Little Wild Indigo." My Japanese friends and I took the wrong road with our kurumas, and, thanks to this happy mis- take, meandered on wheels for half the sunny after- noon through a country wonderfully rustic, consider- ing that Tokio was so near at hand. The rice-fields stretched out on all sides, bright with the young crop, over which were flitting great dragon-flies, blue and bronze, and butterflies as big as bats, with black velvet and crimson, or brown and amber, or saffron and scarlet wings. On the drier ground, interminable rows of the egg-plant, nasubi, hung heavy with the black-purple fruit ; now everywhere in use as a vegetable ; and clumps of hydrangea, with pale blue clustering blossoms, grew beside the little huts of wood, paper, and thatch, where the Japanese babies, glad of the summer heat, played stark naked, while their " sisters, cousins, and aunts," in clothing almost as simple, did the small daily duties of the homestead. Every now and then, at the foot of a wooded slope, you would see the red torii of a shrine raised to Inari-Sama, the deity of farming, who has the fox for his badge, and gives or withholds bumper crops. On the banks and fences not many wild flowers are observed blooming, but you do notice two or three lilies A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY. 495 among them a Crown Imperial late irises, a small white umbellifer, like our meadow-sweet, and the pretty sprays of the lithospermum, after which "Little Wild Indigo" was named. You would very much miss the birds, which render an English country lane so vocal. The Japanese woods sadly lack feathered musicians, but in the open districts our own lark, hibari, may be heard, and there is a little songster, the Cettria cantans, which is called by what I must think is an extravagant compliment " the nightingale of Nippon." Presently we plunge into a bamboo thicket, where the long green canes and arrow-headed foliage make the road by their flickering shadows a mosaic of black and gold ; and so we come into the right path, at the entrance of the village of Meguro, where stands an old Shinto fane surrounded by tall, dark, cryptomeria trees. This is a favourite place with jealous women who wish to turn the hearts of indifferent lovers. The Japanese day is divided into twelve periods, named after the rat, ox, tiger, and hare ; the dragon, horse, snake, and ram ; and the ape, cock, hog, and fox. In the watch of the ox ushi-no-toki that is to say, about three in the morning, the wronged damsel goes, in a white kimono, with a candle lighted in a fillet on her head and with a mirror bound round her neck, carrying a little straw figure representing her wayward lover, which she nails to one of the great trees, praying to the genius of the place to turn his unkind heart or punish him with sickness. Further on, another little temple is seen in a grove 496 SEAS AND LANDS. that of Yaku-Shi ; and as the image here came to shore riding on a cuttle-fish, nobody who resorts to it is allowed to use the Ika for food. It must be observed, however, that to abstain from cuttle-fish would not be considered any severe hardship by those Europeans who have tried to eat it. Now we turn between two tea-houses, where the musumes, in hospitable chorus, beseech us to enter as soon as we have made our "honourable supplications," and the jinrikisha rolls into the paved court of the celebrated temple of Fud6-Sama. At the bottom of the stone stairway, leading to the chief shrine, are to be seen chapels, in the Japanese style, containing effigies of Em-ma, the judge of the wicked, who is really the Indian god Yama, regent of the dead, imported with Buddhism ; and of Shodzuka-No-Baba, the old hag who waits on the banks of the river dividing this world from the next, and strips little children of their earthly clothing there, setting them afterwards to pick up stones if their friends in this life have not previously filled the lap of Jiz6 with pebbles to propitiate her. At the left of the steps sparkles a pool of clear water, fed by a small water- fall, flowing through the mouth of a brass dragon. When we approached a penitent sinner was stand- ing under this heavy jet of water, receiving it on his head, and praying hard all the time with clasped palms. This is called the Sui-Giyo, or " water-cure " for sin, and is considered highly efficacious, as well as rather pleasant in summer. Another penitent was doing the Hiyakudo, or " hundred-turn walk," A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY. 497 passing backwards and forwards between two points, and repeating a prayer at each run, the tally of which he kept by depositing on a stone at every round a twisted straw. If you do not feel wicked or warm enough to go through either of these lustral performances, you can get quit of quite a number of peccadilloes by buying outside the temple some small birds, fish, or tortoises, and setting them free into the woods or the water, in honour of the compassion of the Lord Buddha. We mount the stone steps and reach the shrine, painted bright red and roofed with copper, containing some very curious images and treasures, and among them a particularly strange bronze figure of a dragon coiled round a sword, supposed to symbolise the two principles of life. In front of the altar are suspended gongs, which you sound by banging them with a twisted red and white rope. I take off my hat while my companions vigorously invoke the Deity, repeat their light- hearted prayers, and afterwards clap their little hands together, to let heaven know that its attention is no longer requested for the present. Then we descend the steps, call at one of the tea- houses for the key to the lovers' grave, and, guided by two or three laughing musumes, find our way to a door in a wooden fence leading into an old burying-ground. Here, under a tiny pent-house of weather-worn boards, * are two moss-covered stones, projecting from the damp earth, with two little cisterns of stone in front of them, one containing * Vide p. 489. 2 I 498 SEAS AND LANDS. rain-water and the other sand and ashes. The musumes have brought with them a bundle of senko, which we stick up in the sand and light. The fra- grant blue smoke of the incense curls among the bamboo stems and leaves, and diffuses agreeable wafts, while somebody reads to us what is written on the stones, and on the sotoba, or wooden tablets planted in the ground round the grave. " This is the tomb of the Shiyoku," it says. The Shiyoku were fabulous birds, which always flew with their near wings joined together, and became the emblem of love and fidelity. Another stone says : " In the old days his beauty was like that of the cherry flower, and she looked upon it with a love like that of the sunshine. These two birds have died in their too-short flight ; the cherry blossoms have perished without fruit ! " The story is admirably, though briefly recounted in Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan." But I received some curious additions from my companions, and from the local guardians of the spot. Shirai Gompachi was a young Japanese gentleman, a two- sworded Samurai, in the train of a Daimio of Inaba, who, by the age of eighteen, had become widely known in his own province for great personal beauty and courage, and perfect skill in the use of the sword. Those were the days when the sword was the "life and soul of the Samurai." The sword- makers were honoured beyond all craftsmen ; they forged their blades amid solemn ceremonies ; and, to mount and ornament them, the best workmen A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY. 499 lavished all that art could command. Noblemen would give a whole estate to buy a famous weapon, the edge of which should be so keen that a lotus- stalk descending a stream against it would be cut in twain, while it would not turn or notch if you clove an iron spear-handle with it. The etiquette of the sword governed all Japanese society. Once drawn, it must never be sheathed until reddened by blood, and must never be unsheathed in the precincts of the palace. Young Gompachi, on a certain unlucky day, quarrelled with a companion, and drawing his sword upon him in the court, fought with and killed him. For this he had to fly to Yeddo, then but a small city, and to hide in its suburbs. It was a wild time everywhere, and he put up one night in an inn where a gang of robbers lived, some six or seven, who could not see his richly-ornamented sword and dirk without coveting them, and also concluding that the owner must have plenty of gold coins in his girdle. As little could the musume of the house, a singularly lovely girl, wait upon the handsome young stranger with- out interest. In the dead of the night, Gompachi was sleeping soundly after his long flight, when he was lightly touched by some hand, and, starting up, saw the musume kneeling by the side of his futon. He had not noticed before how beautiful she was, this damsel of fifteen years, which in Japan is maturity. " Damatte! do not speak," she said, "I crave your honourable pardon for arousing you ; but you must know this is a den of dreadful robbers, Soo SEAS AND LANDS. who last year carried me off from my father's house iu Mikawa, under the hill of Azabu. To-night they will murder you to get your sword, and clothes, and money. You seem to be as brave as you are hand- some. If you are really skilful with the sword, prepare yourself, and I will try to help you ; and if you can get away safely take me with you, for I love you, and am risking my life to tell you all this." Gompachi answered, " Greatly I thank you, O Ko-Murasaki San ! but I will not have you hazard one hair of your beautiful head for my sake. Steal out of the house and wait in the shadow of the bamboos for me. As soon as I have tied up my sleeves and fastened back my hair, I will come to you, and if any seek to stay me I will kill them." Accordingly she went out, and while Gompachi was putting on his day dress the thieves stealthily entered by another door, with drawn swords, but were disconcerted to find the young Samurai leap upon them, his long sword in one hand, and in the other the Ai-Kuchi, the dirk, to guard and to despatch. Two of the knaves he instantly cut down, slashed the arm from another, and from another the leg, so that the survivors, being terrified, made way for him, and then, calmly wiping his Katana with white paper before sheathing it, he came to where "Little Wild Indigo" waited trembling for him in the bamboos. Reassuring her, he conducted her to Mikawa, to her father's house, where they over- whelmed him with thanks, and would have kept him as a son of the establishment, but that he said A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY. 501 a Samurai must live by his sword, and so he would go to take service with some lord. He promised, however, to the weeping girl that he would soon return ; and receiving as a friendly present two hundred ounces of silver, he started forth again on his wanderings. He had been absent about a year, experiencing all sorts of adventures, till he fell into the society of a wardsman of Jeddo, named Ch6bei, who helped him to lead, I am sorry to say, the usual reckless life of his time and age. In those days letters were seldom written, news was scant, and he neither heard nor, it seems, tried very much to hear from Ko-Murasaki. But one night at dinner, talk arose at Ch6bei's house of a very beautiful Geisha who was newly come to the Yoshiwara, and whose dancing and singing made the sign of the "Three Sea Coasts," where she was an inmate, famous. Gompachi repaired to the " Three Sea Coasts," and saw there sitting among the immoral sisterhood his Ko-Murasaki, the "Little Wild Indigo" of Mikawa. In deep distress she told him that overwhelming calamity had fallen upon her house- hold ; that her parents became poverty-stricken, and in danger of starvation ; that not hearing from him, or seeing him, or meeting him, she had been obliged to submit to the fate of many and many a Japanese maiden, and sell herself, for the sake of her father and mother, to the Master of the Yoshi- wara. " But now," she said, " that I have seen you once more, you, who are so strong and brave, will S 02 SEAS AND LANDS. help me ; do not desert me again." The beauty of the girl filled his heart full as before, and he gave up everything to visit her daily. But at the Yoshi- wara money must be spent, and being a Ronin, without any means, Gompachi soon came to the bottom of his wits and his purse, and was driven at last to crime, by love and poverty combined. For Ko-Murasaki's sake though she herself did not know it he betook himself to robbery and murder. His heart grew blacker and blacker by these concealed wickednesses. Just as he had amassed, however, gold enough by his robberies to buy Ko-Murasaki's liberty, the authorities, who were aware of his deeds, laid hands upon him. He was proved guilty of murder and plunder, and be- headed on the execution ground. Ch6bei, the wardsman, claimed his body and head, and buried them in the grounds of the rural Temple, at Meguro, and Ko-Murasaki first knew of the event by hearing the people in the Yoshiwara talk of the handsome young Samurai, who, for his heinous crimes, had been forbidden the privilege of his rank to commit the hara-kiri; but was despatched like a common malefactor. The same night she fled from the " Three Sea Coasts," walked all the way swift-footed to Meguro, and threw herself on the newly-made grave of her lover, whose sins she seems too easily to have forgiven, committed for her sake. In the morning the priests of the temple found the 'dead body of the lovely girl, lying with pierced throat, by the stone. They placed her side A JAPANESE LOVE-STORY. 503 by side with Gompachi, in the same earth, and, with all their faults, the loving fidelity of "Little Wild Indigo " and the desperate devotion of her guilty, but brave and handsome Samurai, have, it seems, consecrated the place, so that it is the chief attraction of Meguro. As usual in all such Japanese stories, the woman comes out best. It was certainly for the sake of Ko-Murasaki, and not at all for Gompachi's, that I myself paid for the incense sticks. To make even of her an ideal heroine the Western mind would have, no doubt, a good deal to excuse ; yet it is characteristic of the Japanese way of thinking on these subjects that Ko-Murasaki is praised upon her tombstone for her misao that is to say, her feminine virtue. As we sat. afterwards in the tea-house watching the white lotuses close up one by one as the sun disappeared, and drinking tea perfumed with the salted blossoms of the cherry, I inquired how the priests could possibly eulogise a girl who, whatever her difficulties and distresses, had notoriously taken service in the Yoshiwara. The answer was, in Japanese, Karada de nema shita, Kokoro no naka de nemasen deshita, which means " That she sinned not with the will of her heart." And this appeared to be quite the accepted view of those present. AZABU, August 1890. CHAPTER XXXV. ASCENT OF FUJI-SAN. I HAVE just made, in the company of Captain John Ingles, R.N., Naval Adviser to the Imperial Government of this country, and a young Japanese gentleman Mr. Asso a very fortunate and delight- ful ascent of Fuji-San, the famous mountain. You would not wonder, residing here, that everybody in Japan talks about Fuji, and thinks about her ; paints her on fans, and limns her with gold on lacquer ; carves her on temple-gates and house-fronts, and draws her for curtains of shops, and signboards of inns, rest-houses, and public institutions. Living in Tokio, or Yokohama, or anywhere along this Tokaid6 the Southern road of Japan you would soon perceive how the great volcano dominates every landscape, asserts perpetually her sovereignty over all other hills and mountains, and becomes, in reality as well as imagination, an indispensable element in the national scenery. Far away at sea, when ap- proaching Japan, if the weather be clear, long before the faintest blue line of coast is discernible from the deck, there is seen hanging in the air a dim white symmetrical cone, too constant for a cloud, which is Fuji-San. After you have landed and taken up your ASCENT OF FUJI'S AN. 507 residence at Yokohama, Tokio, or any point of the south-eastern littoral, you will be always seeing Fuji-Yama from some garden nook, some tea-house gallery, some grove of cryptomerias, or thicket of bamboo, or even from the railway-carriage window. In the spring and autumn, as frequently as not, she will, indeed, be shrouded in the dense masses of white or grey cumulus which her crest collects, and seems to create, from the mists of the Pacific. But during summer, when the snows are all melted from the vast cone, and again in winter, when she is covered with snow half way down her colossal sides, but the air is clear, the superb mountain stands forth, dawn after dawn, and evening after evening like no other eminence in the world for beauty, majesty, and perfectness of outline. There are loftier peaks, of course, for Fuji-San is not much lower than Mont Blanc, but there is none not even Etna which rises so proudly, alone, isolated, distinct, from the very brink of the sea with nothing to hide or diminish the dignity of the splendid and immense curves sweeping up from where the broad foot rests, planted on the Suruga Gulf, to where the imperial head soars, lifted high above the clouds into the blue of the firmament. By many and many a picture or photograph you must know well those almost perfectly matched flanks, that massive base, the towering lines of that mighty cone, slightly truncated and dentated at the summit. But no picture gives, and no artist could ever reproduce, the variety and charm of the aspects which Fuji-San 508 SEAS AND LANDS. puts on from day to day and hour to hour under the differing influences of air and weather. Sometimes it is as a white cloud that you see her, among the white clouds, changeless among the changeful shapes from which she emerges. Sometimes there will break forth, high above all clouds, a patch of deep grey against the blue, the broad head of Fuji. Sometimes you will only know where she sits by the immense collection of cirrus and cirro-cumulus there alone gathered in the sky ; and sometimes principally at dawn and nightfall she will suddenly manifest herself, from her foot, jewelled with rich harvests, to her brow, bare and lonely as a desert all violet against the gold of the setting sun, or else all gold and green against the rose and silver of the daybreak. Fuji-San, even among her loftiest sisters, is a giantess, nearer, by the best calculation, to 13,000 than 1 2,000 feet of elevation. The legend is that she rose in a single night, .at about the date of Alexander the Great ; and it is not impossible. In 806 A.D. a temple was established on the mountain to the honour of the beautiful Goddess Ko-nohana- saku-ya-Hime, though there is also a special deity of the eminence styled, " O-ana-mochi-no-Mikoto," which means " Possessor of the Great Hole or Crater." As late as the fourteenth century Fuji was constantly smoking, and fire is spoken of with the eruptions, the last of which took place in December 1 707, and continued for nearly forty days. The Ho-yei-san, or hump on the south face, was pro- ASCENT OF FUJI-SAN. 509 bably then formed. In this, her final outbreak, Fuji covered Tokio itself, sixty miles away, with six inches of ash, and sent rivers of lava far and wide. Since then she Has slept, and only one little spot underneath the Kwan-nom-Gatake, on the lip of the crater, where steam exhales, and the red pumice-cracks are hot, shows that the heart of this huge volcano yet glows, and that she is capable of de- stroying again her own beauty and the forests and rich regions of fertility which clothe her knees and feet. It is a circuit of 1 20 miles to go all round the base of Fuji-San. If you could cut a tunnel through her, from Yoshiwara to Kawaguchi, it would be forty miles long. Generally speaking, the lower portion of the mountain is cultivated to a height of 1500 feet, and it is a whole province which thus climbs round her. From the border of the farms there begins a rough and wild, but flowery moorland, which stretches round the hill to an elevation of 4000 feet, where the thick forest-belt commences. This girdles the volcano up to 7000 feet on the Subashiri side and 8000 on the Murayama face, but is lower to the eastward. Above the forest extends a narrow zone of thicket and bush, chiefly dwarfed larch, juniper, and a vaccinium; after which comes the bare, burnt, and terribly majestic peak itself, where the only living thing is a little yellow lichen which grows in the fissures of the lava blocks, for no eagle or hawk ventures so high, and the boldest or most bewildered butterfly will not be seen above the bushes half-way down. 5 io SEAS AND LANDS. The best indeed, the only time for the ascent of the mountain is between July 15 and September 5. During this brief season the snow will be melted from the cone, the huts upon the path will be opened for pilgrims, and there will be only the danger of getting caught by a typhoon, or reaching the summit to find it swathed day after day in clouds, and no view obtainable. Our party of three started for the ascent on August 25, taking that one of the many roads by which Fuji is approached that goes by Subashiri. Such an expedition may be divided into a series of stages. You have first to approach the foot of the mountain by train or otherwise, then to ride through the long slope of cultivated region, then, abandoning horses or vehicles, to traverse on foot the sharper slopes of the forest belt. At the con- fines of this you will reach the first station, called Sho, or Go; for Japanese fancy has likened the mountain to a heap of dry rice, and the stations are named by rice-measure. From the first station to the ninth, whatever road you take, all will be hard, hot, continuous climbing. You must go by narrow, bad paths, such as a goat might make, in loose volcanic dust, gritty pumice, or over the sharp edges of lava dykes, which cut boots and sandals to shreds. Fuji-San can be easily conquered by any robust person in good condition, with plenty of time and perseverance ; but I would not, after my experience, readily take a lady up. Ladies have ascended, for the restriction no longer exists which forbade the sacred mountain to women. But a ASCENT OF FUJI-SAN. 511 sprained ankle or a breakdown of any sort, between the fourth station and the top, especially if the weather were bad, would create a most embarrassing position. To ourselves the Queen of mountains was divinely favourable in point of weather and every other respect. Taking train from Tokio to Gotemba, a station at the mountain's foot, we engaged " two- men rikisha" to Subashiri ; rolling along a rough but pretty country road, lined with pine and bamboo, and rice fields where the early crop was already in ear. Silk is a great product of the region, and piles of cocoons lay in the sunshine, while the winding- reel everywhere buzzed inside the cottages. From time to time Fuji would reveal portions of her mighty outline, but she was mainly shrouded till we reached Subashiri, and put up at a native inn called Yone- Yana. It is the custom with pilgrims to present the flags of their sect which they bring to the innkeepers, who suspend them on strings, the consequence being that the little town fluttered with pennons of all colours from end to end of the long street, terminating and overhanging which you saw Fuji-San gigantic, beautiful, terrible clearly and cloudlessly shown from head to foot, promising us a good reward for our climb of the morrow. In the inn at night all the talk is about the volcano, the state of the path, the chances of fine weather, and so forth. We order three horses and six ninsoku, or "leg-men," to carry the indispensable blankets aud provisions. They are to be ready at four o'clock 5 i2 SEAS AND LANDS. in the morning, and we turn in early to get as much sleep as possible. At daybreak the horses are brought, and the six coolies, two by two, bind upon their backs the futons and the food. We start, a long procession, through a broad avenue in the forest, riding for five miles, under a lovely dawn, the sun shining gloriously on the forehead of Fuji, who seems farther off and more immensely lofty the nearer we approach. The woodland is full of wild strawberries and flowers ; including tiger-lilies, clematis, Canterbury bells, and the blue hotari-no-hana, or fire-fly blossom. At 6.3 A.M. we reach Uma-Gayeshi, or " turn-the-horses back," and hence to the mountain top there is nothing for it but to walk every step of the long, steep, and difficult path. Two of the men with the lightest loads lead the way along the narrow path, in a wood so thick that we shall not see Fuji again till we have passed through it. It takes us every now and then through the gates and precincts of little Shinto temples, where the priests offer us tea or mountain water. In one of these, at Ko-mitake, we are in- vited to ring the brass gong in order that the deity may make our limbs strong for the task before us. And this is solemnly done by all hands, the ninsoku slapping their brown thighs piously after sounding the bell. Presently the forest clears away ; we are in sunlight again, well upon the lower slopes of Fuji ; but the opening is due to an awful pheno- menon. In the early part of the year an avalanche had descended down the valley which we are climb- ASCENT OF FUJI-SAN. 513 ing. In a single night Fuji will often collect millions of tons of snow upon her cone, and then will let it slip next day, as a lady puts off her bonnet de unit. One of these great snow slides has rolled down our valley and crushed perfectly flat every shrub and sapling and tree, on a track half a mile wide right through the forest. The stoutest pines and beeches, the sturdiest larches and oaks, are broken short off at the root and pressed close to the earth, just as when a heavy roller goes over long grass. One look at this is enough to explain why it is not prudent to ascend Fuji when the snow lies upon her sides. Up those sides we must now steadily trudge by a path which begins unpromisingly enough, and grows constantly ruder and harder. It is not so bad among the dwarf alder bushes, where grows the curious and very rare glabra, called by the Japanese Niku, the root of which is sovereign for wounds and bruises. But it is quite bad enough long before we reach Shi-go-me, at 9.30 A.M., where we are to breakfast. This is Station No. 4, a rude hut built of black and red lava blocks, and standing at an eleva- tion of 8420 feet. You will see how we have been ascending. The stage on horseback from Subashiri lifted us 2000 feet ; to the temple with the bell we made another 2000 feet of altitude ; and now, at Shi-go-me, we are 2000 feet higher still. A vast stratum of clouds hides at present the lower world ; but it breaks away in places to let us see and admire a lovely lake shaped like the new moon, 2 K 5 i4 SEAS AND LANDS. and called Mikazuki, shining in the hills near Yoshida. It is already welcome enough to halt and shake the sharp ashes from our boots, while we drink Liebig essence in hot water and eat tinned meats with an appetite sharpened by the already keen air. But we have a great height yet to climb to No. 6 Station, where we shall lunch, and the path henceforward is of two kinds both abomin- able. Either you zigzag to and fro in the loose black and red ashes, too steep and slippery to climb directly ; or you pick your way over the rugged slag and clinkers of a lava dyke, which is like ascending a shattered flight of steps or climbing the face of a furnace bank. Every fifteen minutes one or other of the strong mountaineers accompany- ing us cries out, " O yasumi ! " and we all sink gladly on the nearest block, breathing quick and hard, the air being now so rarefied that it seems impossible to get enough into the lungs. After each rest, of a minute or two, we plod on towards the little black lava hut marked by flutter- ing red and white flags, which is our next goal ; and truly very far off, and very high up, and very hard to reach each in turn seems to be. Yet one by one, keeping steadily at work, we attain to stations "four and a half," "five," "five and a half" (Gogo, go, Shaku), and then at last to No. 6 (Roku- go-Me), where we stand 10,000 feet above the sea. A halt is called in the little hut for "tiffin" and pipes, and we are joined by a party of pilgrims dressed all in white, with huge white soup-plate ASCENT OF FUyi-SAN. 515 hats, who, like ourselves, are glad enough of a little rest and a whiff or two of the kiseru. Presently we start again up this tremendous cone, which seems to soar higher and higher in the blue the harder we toil to conquer it. Nevertheless, early in the afternoon we do reach Station No. 8, where we shall pass the night, more than 1 1,000 feet above sea level. Not only is the air very rarefied, but also very cold. There lies a large patch of snow in a hollow of the cone close by, and the water freezes where it drips from the kitchen. All vegetation has vanished, even the polygonum, and we are glad to unpack our blankets and lie under them round the hibachi, while such a meal as the mountain hut can furnish is being prepared. It consists of little else than small salted fish fried upon rice, but we supplement it with tinned provisions, and wash it down with weak whisky and water. To realise the sleep which ensues after pipes and Japanese chat you must have been yourself climbing from daybreak till four in the afternoon. The shortest time in which the ascent has been made is six hours and a half. We, taking it more easily, made no attempt to beat the record, and stopped frequently to botanise, geologise, &c. The rarefaction of the air gave our Japanese com- panion, Takeji San, a slight headache, which soon passed as the circulation became accustomed to the atmosphere ; but Captain Ingles and I, being, I suppose, both in excellent health and strength, experienced no inconvenience worth mentioning. At half-past four next morning, while I was. 5i6 SEAS AND LANDS. dreaming under my thick coverings, a hand touched me and a voice said softly, " Danna Sama, hi no de ! " "Master, here is the sun !" The shoji at my feet were thrown open. I looked out, almost as you might from the moon, over a prodigious abyss of space, beyond which the eastern rim of all the world seemed to be on fire with flaming light. A belt of splendid rose and gold illumined all the horizon, darting long spears of glory into the dark sky overhead, gilding the tops of a thousand hills, scattered over the purple plains below, and casting on the unbroken background of clouds beyond an enormous shadow of Fuji. The spectacle was of unparalleled splendour, recalling Lord Tennyson's line " And, in the East, God made Himself an awful Rose of Dawn." Moment by moment it grew more wonderful in loveliness of colour and brilliant birth of day ; and then, suddenly, just when the sun rolled into sight an orb of gleaming gold, flooding the world beneath with almost insufferable radiance a vast mass of dense white clouds swept before the north wind over the view, completely blotting out the sun, the belt of rose and gold, the lighted mountains and plains, and the lower regions of Fuji-San. It was day again, but misty, white, and doubtful ; and when we started to climb the last two stages of the cone the flags of the stations were invisible, and we could not know whether we should find the summit clear, or wrapped in enveloping clouds. ASCENT OF FUyi-SAN. 517 All was to be fortunate, however, on this happy day ; and after a hard clambering of the remaining 2000 feet we planted our staffs victoriously on the level ground of the crater's lip, and gazed north, south, east, and west through clear and cloudless atmos- phere over a prodigious prospect, whose diameter could not be less than 300 miles. It was one of the few days when O-ana-mochi, the Lord of the Great Hole, was wholly propitious ! Behind the long row of little black huts, standing on the edge of the mountain, gaped that awful, deadly Cup of the Volcano an immense pit half a mile wide and six or seven hundred feet deep, its sides black, yellow, red, white, and grey, with the varying hues of the lava and scoriae. In one spot, where a per- petual shadow lay, from the ridge-peaks of Ken-ga- mine and the Shaka-no-wari-ishi, or "Cleft Rock of Buddha," gleamed a large patch of unmelted snow, and there was dust-covered snow at the bottom of the crater. We skirted part of the crater, passed by the dangerous path which is styled " Oya-shirazu, Ko-shirazu," "The place where you must forget parents and children, to take care of yourself;" saw the issue of the Kim-mei-sai, or " Golden famous water," and of the Gim-mei-sai, or " Silver famous water," and came back to breakfast at our hut silent with the delight and glory, the beauty and terror of the scene. Enormous flocks of fleecy clouds and cloudlets wandered in the lower air, many thousand feet beneath, but nowhere concealed the lakes, peaks, rivers, towns, villages, valleys, sea- S i8 SEAS AND LANDS. coasts, islands, and distant provinces spreading out all round. Imagine the prospect obtainable at 13,000 feet of elevation through the silvery air of Japan on a summer's morning with not a cloud, except shifting, thin, and transitory ones, to veil the view ! I had promised a Japanese lady, with whose friendship I am honoured, to carry her staff up and down Fuji, and to write her a letter in verse from its summit ; and I will venture to quote from this letter, which I composed, wrapped in rugs and coats, on the mats of the hut at the top, while our rice was being cooked, since it records the actual impressions of the hour : "SUMMIT OF FUJI-YAMA, August 26, 1890. " On the top of Fuji-San Now we lie ; and half Japan, Like a map immense, unrolled, Spreads beneath us, green and gold. Southwards pale and bright the Sea Shines, from distant Misaki Round Atami's broken coast, Till its silvery gleam is lost, Mingled with the silvery sky, Far away towards Narumi. Northwards, yonder blink of blue Over Mina and Bi-shiu (Say the guides) is Biwa Lake Forty ri removed to take The stork's road, through the sapphire air : Now, if I had his painted pair Of wings, I would this moment lend Those strong plumes to my absent Friend. That she might come without one soil Of dust on tabi, or long toil Of weary walking up this steep, To gaze o'er the Pacific deep, ASCENT OF FUJI-SAN. 519 Fuji's vast sides, a Mountain-world With, halfway down, the soft clouds curled Around her waist, an obi fair, Scarlet and gold, like what you wear ! The Rivers, running far below, As white threads on a green cloth show ; The towns are tiny purple spots, The villages small greyish dots. Over the tallest mountains round We look from Fuji's monstrous mound, And see clear past them, just as you Spy Mita plain from Azabu. O-Yama to a molehill shrinks ! Bakai-Zan, now, one hardly thinks As high as Kompira, that hill You climbed, with such good grace and will, At Ikao, in the pelting rain ; We see those Ikao ranges plain, Beyond Ko-shiu, and, near to view, Karuizawa's green tops, too. What sunny hours, what pleasant times, We had there in our strolls and climbs ! I like the Mountains of Japan Best, at your side, O Yoshi San ! " Gotemba to Subashiri The road was rough, yet fair to see; Red lilies glittered in the grass, And rice waved green as we did pass Nigher to this majestic Hill, Which grander grew, and statelier still In ever-changing cloudy dress As we drew close : her loveliness Most perfect, when, at sunset-time, The mists rolled from this brow sublime And showed o'erhanging the long street Alive with many a pilgrim's feet, And fluttering with ten thousand flags Proud Fuji to her topmost crags, 5 2o SEAS AND LANDS. Purple against the amber sky, A Queen ! A World ! A Mystery ! While yet we paced the forest road, Where dark woods make a garment broad For Fuji's knees, and dappled shade Upon the crumbling pumice played, I wished you nigh, that you might share The sweetness of the morning's air, The glory of the sunrise, now Crowning with gold great Fuji's brow. But where the avalanches tear The flank of the red mountain bare, And we to climb this peak began 'Mid rocks and dust, Yoshi San ! At each hard step I did rejoice Not there to hear your lightsome voice, Not there to see your zori tread The way which, ever overhead, Zigzagged the shoulder of the crag, All shifting lava-ash and slag. Glad were we, as each point we gain, To know you safe in the warm plain ! Clambering from " Station Nine's " bleak rock, We reached the " Cup " at eight o'clock, Where 1 pen this, to keep my word, And show that, wholly undeterred By cold, and high up in the sky, My thoughts back to my best friends fly Down from the top of green Japan, To chat with you, Yoshi San ! To say, " Ohayof" thus to you, Through thirty ri of sundering Blue '" We made a long march of it that day of delight ; for, besides finishing the assault of the mountain from the Eighth Station to the top and walking about the crater's rim, we had to get all the way back on foot to Uma-gayeshi, where our horses would be ASCENT OF FUyi-SAN. 521 waiting. But down-hill and up-hill are different things, and though it is extremely uncomfortable work, ploughing ankle-deep in lava-dust on the de- scending paths, which go more directly than the ascending, still we made good time, and reached Ichi-go-Me, the lowest hut,, by 1.30 P.M. A steep descent in loose slag is perhaps worse than a steep climb over lava-dykes, but does not last so long, and certainly there is nothing in the feat of crown- ing Fuji-San of which a reasonably vigorous man has any reason to be proud. It is easy enough with perseverance and good wind and legs ; but I would never advise ladies to essay it, nor men not in good condition. Thirteen thousand feet of altitude naturally imply some sturdy exertion, and neither I nor my companions would deny that the mats of the inn at Subashiri seemed wonderfully soft and wel- come when we threw ourselves upon them at dinner- time that Wednesday evening. At the temple with the bell we were duly stamped shirts, sticks, and clothing with the sacred mark of the Mountain, and having made the hearts of our faithful and patient ninsoku glad with extra pay, turned our backs on the great extinct volcano, whose crest, glowing again in the morning sunlight, had no longer any secrets for Captain Ingles, or Takaji San, or myself. AZABU, August 30, 1890. CHAPTER XXXVI. IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS. JAPAN is a land of mountains, and the Japanese pas- sionately admire, and vastly delight in, the beautiful highlands which diversify their Empire. Twelve- thirteenths of its surface are indeed totally withdrawn from cultivation, either by the broken character of the country or the prevalence on the uplands and ranges of dense undergrowth of bamboo-grass and wild thicket, which nothing can clear away. Except in small patches, therefore, where circumstances are favourable to an energetic agriculture, the Japanese regard and employ their mountains chiefly as delights to the eye and pleasant refuges from the sultry weather which is now bathing the plains in a burn- ing, oppressive atmosphere. The sea coasts at this season are as hot as the inland plains, or hotter, and there is thus an almost universal exodus of people from the cities, towns, and villages to the innumer- able places of retreat perched amid the green and lovely hills of Nippon. The fashion among the middle and lower classes of the people is to go as pilgrims. Dressed in a white haori, white drawers, and white leggings that colour betokening peni- tence for past sins, and a resolution, more or less A COUNTRY WOMAN. KL'KI, AND FLOWERS. IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS. 525 earnest, to turn over a new leaf of the book of life the citizen starts forth with a coloured flag, a staff, a small satchel, and a straw hat, marked with the symbol of his sect, for some favoured spot, high among the hills, where he can unite a little devotion with a great deal of pure, cool air, delightful scenery, and constant bathing. He needs not to carry, and he does not carry, any luggage. His bare feet want no newly-washed tabi. At every yadoya he will be supplied with a clean kimono for his bath and dinner, with futons to sleep upon, and with the simple food, supplemented by the eternal gozen (the tub of boiled rice), which is all he needs, for an extremely small sum per diem. Europeans are naturally, and not improperly, overcharged at such resorts, since they prove ofttimes difficult guests ; but we a party of six have lately paid a bill at the native inn of this place for four days' board and lodging, together with washing and plenty of fresh milk, which did but amount to eleven yen, or about thirty-four shillings. With such cheap and plea- sant arrangements everywhere existing, the Japanese people move about their beautiful land in great numbers during the summer and early autumn, mostly on foot. They are in truth a nation of pedestrians, at least as regards the lower classes, and shuffle along with their wooden clogs or grass sandals over an astonishing deal of ground. Many railway lines run along the coasts or through the lowlands, carrying passengers easily and quickly, if not with very great comfort, in the crowded third- 526 SEAS AND LANDS class carriages, to the foot of many a splendid range of mountains. Then it is but to mount with a stout step to some village nestled three or four thousand feet above the rice fields, where heat and mosquitoes are left behind, and the boundless verdure of the rolling hills, rich with a hundred flowers, restores mind and body. Above all, your Japanese loves those spots in the mountains where a hot spring issues from the rocks and can be utilised for baths more or less medicinal. Ikao, whither we have lately repaired, is a good specimen of such a place. From a lovely glen in the cleft of a ridge there issues here a thin but strong stream of warm water, so impregnated with sulphides of iron and soda that it colours all its channel a bright golden-yellow, as it bubbles and smokes downwards to lose itself in the larger torrents. Such a gift from the subterranean world and such gifts abound almost always creates in Japan a town or village for its due enjoyment. Ikao climbs up the mountain alongside its precious rillet of the "O Yu " in a street of stone stairs more precipitous and picturesque than any in Malta ; and all the inns and most of the houses lead a private trickle of the hot spring through bamboo pipes into a bath-house, where, three or four times a day, visitors or residents sit up to their necks in the soft embrace of the liquid heated for them in the underground furnaces of our Planet. There is much simplicity and very little concealment about the system of these Japanese spas. The business of IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS. 527 the place is to bathe, and, with or without garments, everybody is always bathing, as always the golden water is bubbling down from the dark rocks which are overshadowed with all kinds of strange trees, and clad with ferns, squills, wild clematis, and the Canterbury bell, called here " chochin no hana," the lantern-flower. Our party of six, including the two Japanese ladies, mounted to Ikao by a long string of j'm- rikishas, each drawn by two men. The ascent occupies four hours, and the kurumayas stop twice or thrice to refresh. Sharply the little vehicles wheel round at the front of the chaya ; the musumes raise a chorus of irrashais ; the travellers dismount and sip tea or barley-water ; the rikisha-men wring the perspiration from their headcloths and coats, wash down their tattooed bodies with cold water, rinse out their mouths, eat a bowl of rice soaked with hot tea, and are ready again for a long spell of uphill work. In the heart of the hills kurumas cannot pass, and you must tramp afoot to the many lovely spots of interest, or ride in the kago, a con- trivance of luxurious ease for the native, but of swiftly-increasing torture to the foreigner. It is like the lid of a big basket suspended on a stout bamboo, and you must sit on your feet, or cross them against the slings of the kago either position speedily resolving itself for the inexperienced into something between paralysis and the rack. For the most part, therefore, during the many and delightful excursions made from Ikao as a centre our kagos 528 SEAS AND LANDS. followed us empty, for even our fair Japanese com- panions proved excellent pedestrians, and tripped and glittered through the winding woods and over the wild moorlands, clad every day in some new and bright kimono, which made them look like butterflies or birds. Thus, taking each day our ample tiffin to enjoy in some lovely sylvan recess, some ancient temple, or by the music and coolness of some lonely cascade, we visited Benten-no-taki, the waterfall of the Goddess of Mercy ; Kompira Yama, the Hill of the Gods, whence half Japan seemed to stretch out, green and tranquil, at our happy feet ; Mizu-sawa, where we lunched at the foot of the altar of Buddha, under carvings of scarlet and gold, and diapered ceilings, and tall black waving cryptomerias, in a spot so solemn and beau- tiful that the Gods might have joined our repast ; Yumoto, the Glen of the Spring, greener and more gloriously decked with ferns and wild flowers than any Devonshire or Scottish coombe or corrie ; and, best and most beautiful of all, Haruna, the " Village of the Gods," hard to be reached, but worth all the fatigue of a long and steep tramp. One of the very fairest spots I have seen on this earth lies midway between Ikao and Haruna. It is a wooded ridge, commanding on either side a view of vast expanse and supreme beauty. To the left opens the verdant Haruna vale, the narrow path winding down into a wilderness of dark majestic forests, flowery hill-sides, fantastic rocks, and foam- ing torrents ; to the right a lovely lake sleeps in the 2 I, IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS. 531 green basin which was once a crater, surrounded by hills of wild and wonderful shapes, and moorlands painted with stretches of white, and red, and yellow blossoms, and patches of black, and purple, and saffron soil. The profusion of lilies growing on these level spaces was truly astonishing. We plunged through the bamboo-grass and reeds, gathering indiscriminately the blood-red tiger-lily, the white lily, the crown-imperial, the golden lily peculiar to Japan and now and again superb sticks of the Lilium auratum, the great cream-coloured bloom, spangled with gold, and silver, and purple, the fragrance of which is as delicious as its grace of shape and hue is perfect. Our ladies came down the last of the hills homeward bearing not merely bouquets, but sheaves of the floral plunder. It was like a procession from a picture of Cimabue, Giotto, or Fra Angelico ; and I think if their descended angels had to choose an earthly dress, the bright and graceful kimono and obi of O Fuku San and O Yoshi San would have surely appeared as near to the charm of a Celestial toilette as earthly fabrics and fashions can well go ! And, after such a long, hard tramp over the mountains, who can exaggerate the delights of the Japanese bath ? It is the first thing we all think of, and say, Yu ni iketai " I wish to go into the honourable hot water!" Dis- carding all garments but the loose, comfortable k'unono, and even forgetting to inquire if dinner be ready, we troop down to the bathing-house. There a row of little chambers contain each an oblong tank, 532 SEAS AND LANDS. level with the sloping floor, into which, through bamboo pipes, the hot mineral stream jets. Its tem- perature is about no degrees, but you may modify this with buckets of cold water, placed at hand. The soft caress of the subterranean lymph seems in a moment to dissipate all bodily fatigue. Up to your chin in the subtly-medicated tide, you meditate placidly on the adventures of the day, the varied pictures of the hills, the moorland gilded with the yellow lilies, the chatter of the walk, half English, half Japanese. It is useless to dress in the hot little furo-do. Every pore of the body is open, and towels are of no avail. Wrapped again in the kimono, you emerge into the open air, without the smallest fear of catching cold, and wonder no longer that the whole place exists solely for the joy of dabbling perpetually in the delicious volcanic rivulet. The drawback of these delectable Japanese moun- tains is their lack of animal life. Hardly a bird or beast will be seen or heard, and Nature appears depopulated. Upon all the long walk to and from Haruna I did but see, apart from the crows and high-flying birds, one brown snake and one lark. One hears occasionally the uguisu, called by flattery the "Japan nightingale "- known to science as the Cettria cantans but its notes, though sweet, are not sustained. There are bears, foxes, badgers, and even deer in the Haruna jungles, and in bygone days there were plenty of monkeys, but none are seen now. Possibly the dense clothing of the hills, which are swathed from base to summit in tussock IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS. 533 grass and dwarf bamboo, forbids the prevalence of small life. On the other hand, butterflies are numerous and splendid, a great black species, large as a bat, with bronze and green reflections, an amber and brown variety, a saffron and red, a green and gold swallow-tail, and abundance of brimstones, peacocks, purple Emperors, and red Admirals. But, as a rule, these fair vistas are desolate of that wild life which adds so much to the charm of other Highlands. From Ikao we descended the mountain slopes in a long line of jinrikishas, the men stripping to the hot work, and disclosing wonderful patterns of blue and red tattooing upon their brown, perspiring bodies. All along the foot of these hills lies the region of silk. Every field is full of dwarf mulberry trees, and every cottage hums with the silk winding wheel, while piles of white cocoons are spread out in the sun to dry. Next to rice the silk crop of Japan is of chief importance, and it was curious to reflect how the fine threads which the country mother was winding, her baby at her breast, and her pipe in her mouth, would glisten and " frou frou" in Paris or London, or New York the robe of some proud beauty who never heard of Ikao or Idzuka. On the road I saw the loveliest lily ever beheld large blossoms of the purest rose-colour, with white and crimson spangles on each petal. The lotus was also flowering in many places, being cultivated for food, its bloom very stately in size and shape, and of pure white or pink. At Idzuka 534 SEAS AND LANDS. the train receives us, and carries us round the range as far as Yokogawa, whence we ascend the mountains again to Karuizawa, nearly 4000 feet above the hot and steaming plains. This station, very popular in the summer with foreigners and Japanese alike, sits high in the clouds upon a curious table-land, surrounded by picturesque hills. One crag, called the Cathedral Rock, really re- sembles very closely the Cathedral of Durham, and near it rises Asama Yama, with steep red sides and smoking apex a still active volcano, and one which everybody ascends. The signs of its activity are everywhere ; all the ground is covered with pumice and ash, and if a cutting be made you can see how, at intervals measured by centuries, the " Hill of the Morning Fires" has covered all the region with black death and desolation, over which Nature and Time have slowly spread a growing mantle of life and verdure, to be again and again obliterated by an eruption. A delightful excursion made here on foot was to Kosei, the glen in the hills where a thin sulphuretted stream issues from the dark crags. There was a bathing-house and little yadoya there, but too remote to be prosperous, and the aruji, the proprietor, offered us the whole establishment at a low price. The hill-sides were covered with wild raspberries of a delicate flavour, and blue and white with the campanula and clematis. We came down again to the railway, and so to Tokio, in heavy rain, and by a bad and broken road but a kuruma can pass almost anywhere, and I am quite sure immense IN THE JAPANESE MOUNTAINS. 535 use might be made of them in war. If I were a general conducting an Indian campaign, I would try to have two or three thousand jinrikishas over from Japan. There is nothing they could not do in the way of transport, wherever two men can walk abreast, and where there exists any sort of path ; and they can pull 200 Ibs. weight for forty or fifty miles, on a little rice and hot tea laughing and chattering all the while. KARUIZAWA, July 28, 1890. CHAPTER XXXVII. EASTERN FORTITUDE. " KORERA-BYO," as the Japanese style the Asiatic cholera, has severely visited the Southern littoral of this Empire during the present hot season. We have been losing, even in our lightly-visited capital, sixty to eighty citizens a day by the pest ; but Tokio has not suffered nearly so much as Nagasaki and Osaka. Up to Saturday last the complete re- turns for the whole country were 21,116 cases, and 13,141 deaths; and in Tokio the figures given yesterday were, from Saturday noon to Monday noon, 93 cases and 60 deaths. You will observe how very heavy is the proportion of fatal results everywhere ; nor do I find by the closest inquiry that any of the devoted medical men, native and foreign, who are combating this scourge have hit upon any successful new treatment, or confirmed the utility of the old-established remedies. When the attack has advanced to a certain stage it is a question of good nursing and of natural forces. But even among those who escape the direct assault of the deadly enemy, multitudes succumb to the fevers and internal mischiefs which follow a bad bout of the spasms, and ultimately collapse, so that 536 EASTERN FORTITUDE. 537 the percentage of deaths is really very sad, and I dare not believe that twenty out of a hundred of the victims of the pest carry their lives safely out of the peril. I dwell upon the dismal topic only because the system pursued by the Japanese authorities is very intelligent, courageous, and thorough ; and well deserves attention. Cholera does not appear to be endemic in Japan, as in India and other countries ; but comes over here every year, more or less, from infected Eastern ports. This season it was China which exported the plague to us. A steamer came in from Shanghai with undetected cases on board ; they landed at Nagasaki, and very soon afterwards the disease began to spread, chiefly in the quarter of the city originally attacked. It is a long way from Nagasaki to Tokio probably 600 miles; but there runs a railway for 330 miles of the distance, and it is always pretty certain that the cholera will make its march over the intervening space in about one month. Nagasaki was isolated, as far as was possible. Ships coming thence to Yokohama had to go into the quarantine ground, and railway trains were inspected and disinfected, often at con- siderable inconvenience to the passengers. During the summer-time there is an universal exodus of foreigners to the hills. The Legations close, and the diplomats flock to Ikao, Nikko, Karuizawa, Miyanoshita, or elsewhere ; schools and colleges are shut ; and public officials get their annual holiday. All these eminent and important persons naturally 538 SEAS AND LANDS. hoped that the cholera would not come to Tokio and Yokohama, or would have cleared out in a be- coming manner before they must return to duty and the lower world. Those among us who stuck to the great city, willing to take our chances with its kindly, bright, industrious, and patient population, issued decrees to the cook-house to boil the water and the milk, and see that the fish was fresh and the rice sweet. Cholera was sure to come, and did very soon arrive, in its usual mysterious fashion. There was a Turkish frigate in the Bay of Yoko- hama called the Ertogroul. She had brought over to Japan the Grand Star of the Medjidieh for the Emperor of Japan ; and Osman Pasha, the Admiral in command, a most accomplished and charming gentleman, had been received with high honours at the Shiro, and was already very popular in our society. I was one day on board his ship, in company with the United States Admiral, and while drinking the superb coffee and delicate rose-water sherbet which the Pasha's hospitality proffered, noticed a verse in Arabic from the " Sura of the Kingdom " to the effect that " Whom He will He slayeth, and whom He will He doth save alive." Next day the verse found grim illustration. The Ertogroul got first one case of cholera, then seven, then sixteen ; and had to go out to sea to drop overboard in deep water those " who had attained the mercy of Allah." Then Yokohama caught it badly, and Tokio began to suffer, ever since when we have had a steady record of attacks and deaths, a true and severe EASTERN FORTITUDE. 539 visitation of the hateful malady, which, speaking as an outsider, and from Indian experience, would surely have swelled to something terrible but for the per- fectly cool, fearless, practical, and enlightened way in which the Japanese authorities do battle with the dreaded foe. Their central idea is to isolate every case as it occurs, and, the police being pretty well omnipotent, this is not so difficult here as it would prove else- where. At the approach of the enemy the executive and civil authorities laid their heads together, got hospitals ready, appointed medical and administra- tive staffs, decided on the methods to be adopted as to disinfectants, conveyance of patients, isolation of relatives and houses, and disposal of corpses, and then issued clear instructions in every ken and cho. When the foe was upon us they made an excellent beginning by severely punishing two medical men who concealed cases of cholera. Rich and poor people alike naturally hate to be " spotted," cut off, carried to the hospital, and buried with scanty ceremony after demise ; so the rich will pay for concealment and the poor will implore it. Our Tokio municipality nipped that in the bud by swingeing penalties on the unfaithful practitioners, and long terms of imprisonment ; after which the danger rather was that zealous doctors would call every casual stomach-ache resulting from too much boiled lotus-stem or unboiled fish "cholera." For, once declared, a policeman in blue or green spec- tacles and a sword comes to the door, makes solemn 540 SEAS AND LANDS. notes of all particulars, orders the kago, and off the patient must go to the sheds, where seventy die out of the hundred ; unless the domestic arrangements are such that there can be surety of isolation, under strict surveillance. Now, the hospital is naturally dreaded. Many Japanese women, and even men with their sensitive natures die actually and posi- tively from the depressing fact of being there good as the treatment is, kindly and brave the nursing, and fearless and devoted the medical assistance. In consequence, the poor people will not proclaim to the doctors the beginning of their attack. They allow the insidious preliminary symptoms to go on, hoping to pull through. It is to this, I think, that the excessive mortality revealed in our present re- turns must be attributed ; to the delay in confessing to an attack, universally practised by the poor, which gives medical science too little opportunity of action. The type of cholera commonest among us is not the worst, or else the cholera hospitals seem especially quiet and painless, because of the extreme gentle- ness and resignation of the Japanese character. You would not know if you passed through the day's quota of cases that seventy per cent, of those amiable, placid, suffering people are already as good as dead ; and in the convalescent ward you would hardly believe that the smiling, grateful, con- tented, but sadly worn and tortured faces have come out of the Valley of the Shadow. I gathered that everything had been tried. Hypodermic injection of morphia is useful at the beginning, and afterwards EASTERN FORTITUDE. 541 good nursing, chafing, chloroform, if the heart will bear it. As much drink as they like, contrary to the old treatment. At best a sad place, the cholera hospital is rendered noble and tolerable only by the high courage of the nurses and doctors, the helpful- ness of man to man under darkest circumstances, and the pretty self-respecting way in which my Japanese fellow-citizens men, women, and children know how to die. During the present visitation, and under this Japanese system, we see curious sights. A small ring of people will be collected round a poor fellow lying on the ground, who has been attacked. Inside the ring the policeman, in white clothes, his sword under his arm, note-book in hand, and spectacles on his nose, takes down with unbroken calm the neces- sary particulars demanded by Government. Not until all is known about name, residence, business, and relatives, will the people with the stretcher be allowed to convey the patient away, and where he lay on the ground a pail of whitewash will be directly spilled and spread. An American doctor of my acquaintance, seeing a poor fellow on the road in this plight, had ample time to ride home, fetch restoratives and medicines, and return to the spot before the police-officer had completed the elaborate particulars which he was entering in hiragana upon his note-book. At another time, in passing down Kyobashi, or threading the back lanes of Kojimachi, yovfr jinrikisfaa-mtaa will give a sudden little nervous twist of the shafts to the kuruma, which you per- 542 SEAS AND LANDS. ceive has been done in order to avoid that one little tenement in the street with the shoji and made all flung wide open. The grim and dismal visitant, the " Korera-byo," has made his call there, though why he should come to the basket-maker's midway between the toy-shop and the bakehouse, where they make the little green and purple cakes, is a mystery not to be solved. You look right through the house, for everything has been thrown open to the winds and rains of heaven. Mats, walls, and shutters have been plentifully and uncom- fortably lime-washed, and in their ruined and deso- late home are patiently seated a woman and baby and a small boy who must not emerge till their quarantine is complete. Outside the house a little square space of ground is also lime-washed, in the midst of which sits the inevitable policeman in white uniform with sword and blue spectacles, leaning back in his chair and reading the " Nichi Nichi Shimbun " or the "Yugata." Anybody wishing to enter the premises would be accosted, and repulsed by him with extreme politeness, and, if politeness failed, with the edge or point of the big sword laid across his knees. Japanese methods admit no interference or nonsense of any kind ; and I believe it is entirely due to this rigid system that the cholera has passed from individual to individual without any great leaps and bounds, and that the daily returns are now happily declining. Moreover, the hot weather is coming to an end. Constant and heavy showers of rain have flushed all the open drains and ditches ; EASTERN FORTITUDE. 543 rice is cheaper, and the rice-fields promise splendidly ; so that, if no recrudescence of the dreadful plague should befall us, it looks as if Japan may be quit this year of the penalty of her neighbourhood to China with a death-tribute of not more than 20.000 lives. But among them what patient, hard-working fathers, what gentle wives and mothers, what pretty little children ! How long will science allow the cholera-bacillus to kill us in this stupid and unlovely manner ? I may add that the custom of perpetual tea- drinking greatly helps the Japanese in such a season as this. When they are thirsty they go to the tea- pot, and the boiled water makes them pretty safe against the perils of the neighbouring well. There is beside a general and widespread intelligence as to the advantage of boiling water and milk, and dipping vegetables and fruit in boiling water, though I am afraid a large majority believes still more implicitly in the virtue of the bit of paper with a charm in Chinese which they buy from the priest at the temple, or in the occasional swallowing of a small picture of the Buddha upon tissue paper. As usual, the worst ravages of the malady have been among the poor and ill-fed, and the pest has thus far almost entirely spared resident Europeans. Another point in favour of the Japanese is their natural freedom from panic. Fear, in any form, is not a vice of this high-tempered and admirable population, whose religion has never taught them to dread the inevitable. At no time has there been 544 SEAS AND LANDS. the slightest difficulty in procuring nurses, bearers, and people to disinfect and carry away corpses ; in fact, the service seems rather popular. I think I have never seen a severe and cruel visitation of cholera met with a finer equanimity among a poor community, or a greater intelligence and better resolution on the part of a Government. AZABU, Sept. 17, 1890. CHAPTER XXXVIII. AN AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO. THE year in this our Japanese capital brings round no anniversary more notable or more eagerly expected by the "Upper Ten" of Tokio than the Garden Party of the Emperor, which is held on or about the 1 2th of every November, in the spacious demesnes of one of the Royal Palaces at Asakusa. His Majesty does not often appear in public, for the traditions of the old days when the Mikado lived as invisible and almost as much venerated as a god, are still strong, although Japan is by this time in her twenty-fourth year of Meiji, the Great Restora- tion. It is, indeed, nearly a quarter of a century since Jishin, the " political earthquake," broke up the foundations of society in Dai Nippon, abolished the Shogunate, gave back to the throne of Japan reality and majesty, and transformed the nation, almost by magic, from an Asiatic oligarchy to a Power modelled on the latest European systems. The Emperor represents, and is contemporaneous with, this immense and unprecedented revolution ; but, resolutely and loyally as he accepts and per- forms all his imperial and constitutional duties, the influence of the vast, the almost interminable and 547 548 SEAS AND LANDS. immemorial past of his dynasty is naturally strong upon him, and he passes most of his days in the stately seclusion of his palace gardens at Nagata-Cho, or some other imperial abode. All the more eagerly is any occasion welcomed, such as the annual garden party, when he mixes quite freely with a large concourse of his devoted subjects, together with the diplomats and representative ladies and gentlemen of the foreign community in Tokio and Yokohama. It is the Festival of the Chrysanthemum which brings with it so happy an innovation, for at this time of year the flower par excellence of Japan, the national Kiku, is everywhere in glowing and glorious bloom, and the ostensible reason for the gathering in the Asakusa Palace Gardens is there- fore to view the innumerable and splendid specimens of this special plant of Nippon which the skilful gardeners of the Court have reared during the year past. Everywhere are now chrysanthemum shows and chrysanthemum parties, and while private gardens are embellished with choice displays in all sorts of colours, the hillsides and lanes are also full of the m^re modest and quiet wild blooms of the same imperial plant, which grows everywhere, and is everywhere, even in the simplest specimens, bright and pretty. In one quarter of the capital may, indeed, bo seen at present an exhibition of all the principal events in Japanese history and mythology worked out in chrysanthemums of every imaginable hue. The plants are made to grow to the shape of the figures to be represented, and then nicely ,42V AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO. 549 trimmed, so as to let the flowers compose almost entirely the colours and outlines of the costume. A suitable mask is added, with foot-gear, arms, equip- ments, and accessories ; and thousands of citizens flock forth to study the pages of their national annals and religious traditions done thus to the vegetable life in the national blossom. Of course, the Imperial gardeners showed samples of the Kiku, which were well worth the study and admiration of all florists and botanists, if attention could have been devoted to them. There is nothing to be seen at your own Temple Gardens, or at any other centre of the cultivation of the " golden- bloom" in England, to compare with the really marvellous developments of the Kiku, under Japa- nese hands. Banging through an endless number of colours, and displaying all forms and fashions of structure, the beautiful plant shows in one place a cluster of close and compact stars of varying hues, in all the tones and tints of white, yellow, russet, amber, purple, and cream ; and in another fantastic and dishevelled yet wildly symmetrical blooms, the petals flung abroad from the corolla in beautiful profusion of scattered loveliness and glory ; some as if of shot-silk or satin ; some revealing a sober lining splendidly contrasted with the brilliant upper sur- face ; some in tangled delicacies of one and the same rich tint the sum-total of their blossoms proudly recorded on wooden tablets, which also bear the highly fanciful and poetical titles allotted to their productions by the Imperial uekeya. " Fountain of 550 SEAS AND LANDS. milk," "White bird of the moonlight," "Golden glory of the hill," " Star of six hundred rays," " Nightingale's delight," " Rising Sun," " Splendour of Japan," "Queen's fingers," "Golden Throne- studs," " Stork's crest," and " Winglet of wild duck " were among these imaginative appellations ; but the graceful and nodding beauties which bore them had to put up with much neglect on this occasion, INVITATION TO THK KMPEKOK's GARDEN PAIITY. because, if as it presently turned out Majesty kept its word, and put in an appearance, everybody must be on the spot at the moment of the Royal approach. Accordingly we are all grouped together, with our backs to the beauties of the parterre, in a mass of some five or six hundred people who have been AN AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO. 551 honoured with the great square cards of invitation to this high function. The Royal card, printed in gold, enjoins all alike to wear frock-coats ("frokko cotto ") and silk hats ; and thus we all look more or less alike diplomats, generals, naval officers, ministers, and private persons diversified only by the Corean officials in long robes of white, and Puritan hats with amber strings, and the ever grace- ful costume of some Japanese ladies present, who have proved faithful even against Court fashion- to kimono and obi. The scene is a vast garden, so full of winding walks, hillocks covered with large trees and thickets of bamboo, pools, bridges, little temples, and cascades, that you might believe your- self deep in the Japanese country, instead of being in the heart of this great city with its thirteen hundred thousand inhabitants. The throng of polite and fashionable folk, which has broken up into knots, conversing in Japanese and almost all the other known tongues, suddenly falls to " Attention," for the strains of the National Anthem of Dai Nippon sounds from the gaily-garbed band. " The Emperor is Coming ! " The Ministers of the Cabinet and the foreign representatives take up a more or less orderly position to the right ; others arrange themselves on the left-hand side. We make a long and wide lane for the Imperial party, which now draws nigh, walking from a kiosk in the gardens to the refresh- ment tents beyond the flower-sheds. His Imperial Majesty comes first, and all alone ! I have often seen him, and always find the same 552 SEAS AND LANDS. difficulty in analysing my own impressions, or conveying them, as to that impassive, reserved, changeless, dark, far-removed countenance. I have seen it all day long in the smoke of the mimic battles- at Nagoya, and all night long in the festal halls at the Shiro, and at receptions and Court ceremonies ; but I never witnessed the slightest alteration of its fixed immobile features. Only a flatterer could call the proud cold face handsome, and only an enemy or a soshi would, I think, style its austere constraint and lofty discontent ill-looking. It is a typical Japanese man's face, in many points. You shall see a thousand such in a week's travelling hereabouts, but this one stands apart in character as in elevation, touched in its most ordinary lines and lineaments with an almost marble reticence and an ironclad refusal to be common, even if Nature has stamped it common, in so much that the slightest bend of the brow in salutation appears to be the result of a superhuman effort of reluctant will. One would say this is a Mikado of the past, who is obliged to belong to and to bow before the too- prevailing present, but who nevertheless keeps his secret soul apart in the stern and great society of his ancestors, and " with the far-off company of antique Shinto gods." He walks between us alone ; his arm too sacred, too separate, to be taken in public even by the Empress, who comes behind, a small, exquisitely-graceful lady dressed in a mauve satin toilette of Parisian style and mauve bonnet, with parasol to match, all borne with the utmost AN AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO. 553 charm and becomingness. Behind her Imperial Majesty, also passing singly, a bevy of ladies of the Court, all but one in European dress ; and following the ladies, the gentlemen of the palace, in black frock-coats and tall hats. His Majesty wears the un- dress uniform of a general cherry-coloured trousers and black frogged coat braided with gold lace, and on the small, close-cut brows a kepi of scarlet with gold band. His bow, in recognition of all our bare and bended heads, is the slightest possible inclination which rigid muscles can make, yet withal accom- panied by a glance, kindly, benign, and full of evident goodwill, for his lips almost smile, his eyes are alert and lighted, his air is, one might almost dare to say, genial ; and these nods of the Japanese Jove must be measured by loyalty with a micrometer. Moreover, when we pass into the refreshment tent, and the Emperor and Empress take their seats, the etiquette observed around is by no means stiff. We may approach the royal table and speak with friends there sitting close to the Majesty of Japan ; nay, when champagne has been quaffed and mayonnaise of lobster or chicken tasted, the Emperor endures very humanly to have personage after personage presented to him, and addresses to some of them to the writer of these notes among many that were more worthy some gracious and friendly words in the soft Japanese, which he always speaks. The ladies of the Court and the gentlemen mingle mean- while with the throng, and chat, sans ceremonie, with friends therein. We enjoy the honour of 554 SEAS AND LANDS. acquaintance with one of the ladies in waiting, who tells us pleasing stories of the goodness and grace of her Imperial Majesty ; and when we regret that Japanese dress seems discarded, invites us to come and inspect the splendid kimono, obi, and kanzashi which the palace wardrobes contain. Soon the procession of departure is re-formed, and the Imperial party returns, the Empress again follow- ing the Emperor, while the plaintive strains of the National Hymn are once more heard, and we saunter out of the palace gardens, between files of bowing servitors and police, into a great crowd of Japanese citizens eagerly waiting at the guarded gates to catch but a glimpse of the gold chrysanthemums on the panels of the carriage which conveys their well- beloved and deeply-venerated Sovereign Lord. The Potentate with whom we have thus passed so easy and informal an afternoon in the groves of Asakusa first of his line visible to ordinary eyes in such a manner is named Mutsuhito, and was born at the ancient capital of Kyoto on Nov. 3, 1852 being, therefore, thirty-nine years old. He is the second son of the late Emperor Komei and of the Empress Fujiwara Asako. He succeeded to the throne in February 1866, but was not crowned until October 12, 1868, after the troublous times of the Great Revolution, which he now represents, had quieted down. The gracious lady his consort, in the mauve robe from Paris, with the black hair banded so demurely over her small dark forehead, is Haruko, Empress of Japan, third daughter of Ichijo AN AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO. 555 Tadaka, a noble of the first rank. Her Imperial Majesty was born on May 28, 1850, and is therefore slightly older than her august spouse.. The one and only babe whom she bore to Mutsuhito a prince died before he had well drawn breath ; but His Majesty, following the custom of his ancestors, has fairly assured the succession with children born to him by the various Princesses who also share his royal affections. The Prince Yoshihito, son of the Lady Yanagiwara, is thus heir-apparent, and has for half-sisters the Princess Shigeko, daughter of the Lady Ume-no-Miya, and the Princess Fusako, baby-child of the Lady Sono. Deprived thus far of the glory of seeing her own offspring inheritor of the antique splendours of the Mikadoship, Her Majesty the Empress relaxes nothing of her devotion to her lord and to his land and subjects. A true Japa- nese woman in that almost divine self-abnegation, patience, and dutifulness which are the common qualities of the gentle daughters of the land, she is a veritable Mother of her Nation, never wearied of good works, and foremost in encouraging all wise social reforms. Her hand as well as that of the Emperor is always stretched forth to help in times of calamity, or famine, or pestilence, such as Japan has unhappily passed through of late. Small in stature, even for a Japanese woman, she contrasts all the more strongly with her Imperial husband, who is taller than the majority of his lieges. He has had the genius, or good fortune, to know how to reconcile in his person the old times and the 55 6 SEAS AND LANDS. new, preserving with high propriety the reserve and distance of his ancestral prototypes who, even while they were the puppets of the Shogunate, ranked well-nigh as gods in the estimation of the Japanese people but accepting and faithfully dis- charging the duties of a constitutional monarch, and taking an active and intelligent part in the affairs of his empire, particularly in all that relates to the army and navy. His Majesty is full of trust in the future greatness of Japan, and proud of her ancient glories. Some Japanese gentlemen of high family brought lately to my house in Azabu a long scroll of silk and birdskin, whereon was painted the invasion of Japan by Kublai Khan. The scroll measured more than 50 feet in length, and was mounted richly with gold and crystals. Documents accompanying it, and the antique lettering of the pictures, confirmed the statement that it had reposed in the keeping of the same family since 1280 A.D., the date of its execution the invasion having taken place in 1259 A.D. Nothing could be more interest- ing than thus to study an almost contemporaneous illustration of the "Armada" of Japanese annals, when the theretofore invincible Kublai flung on the coasts of Dai Nippon an armed host of 1 50,000 men in innumerable ships and boats, only to see them shattered by the brave Japanese soldiers and scattered by tempests, hundreds of his warriors being captured and beheaded on the slopes of Fuji-San. The scroll represented all this stirring story in vivid colours, and with singular precision and beauty of AN AFTERNOON WITH THE MIKADO. 557 detail. The owners needed money, and offered me the treasure at my own price, but I told them it was the counterpart of our own Bayeux tapestry, and ought never to leave the country. 1 sent them, therefore, to the Palace with a recommendatory letter to the Secretary of the Emperor, and as soon as His Majesty inspected the ancient and deeply interesting monument, he ordered that it should be carefully kept, along with a silken banner of the Tartar Admiral accompanying it, in the Royal Archives ; and gave a handsome price to the de- lighted owners. TOKIO, November 14, 1890. CHAPTER XXXIX. THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT. I HAVE just returned from witnessing the most interesting and important spectacle in the modern history of Japan. I have seen the birth of a new Parliament, the only assembly of the kind known to the Continent of Asia, modelled upon European systems, traditions, and precedents, and meeting for its very first visible embodiment, with all constitu- tional forms and ceremonies, under the imperial patronage and presence of the Mikado, lately a sovereign so removed from mortal sight and spheres as to be almost regarded as a deity, but to-day viewed discharging the duties of a Constitutional Monarch, with his Peers, his faithful Commons, and his Ministers of State around him. Conceive the prodigious import of such an event ! However it may develop, and whatever may be the results to Dai Nippon and to Asia at large from this stupendous innovation, it is at least to the immortal glory of Japan that she of all Oriental nations has been the earliest to range herself under the banner of organised freedom, of public liberty, and legisla- tion guaranteed by free institutions. Great Britain especially, " the august Mother of Parliaments," 558 THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT 559 cannot but look with glad and friendly eyes on this, the latest and most earnest of her imitators, for which reason I will describe at some length and with minuteness how the First Parliament of the Empire of Japan was to-day opened by His Majesty the Emperor in person, before the two Houses, and in presence of all the great officers of State, the Court dignitaries, the foreign diplomats, and the few unofficial foreigners privileged to behold the novel and profoundly interesting ceremony. This immense event has not come at a bound, for then we might justly regard it as precipitate and doomed to failure. The Government and the nation have been educating themselves up to so high a point of progress ever since the opening of the Meiji era, a quarter of a century ago. Then the power of the Shogunate fell ; authority was stripped from those proud and despotic lords who had kept the Mikado in seclusion like a gilded idol. The Emperor of Japan resumed the active, as well as sacred, authority descended from a long line of ancestors, but filched from them and him by splendid usurpers of the pattern of those buried like kings in Shiba and Nikko. The last of the Shoguns resigned in 1867, and the first attempt at a General Council was made, after the imperial oath of 1868, that Japan should have representative institutions, by calling together three Samurai from each clan. They met at Kioto under the name of Gi In, or Parliament, and afterwards in Tokio with the appellation of Shiugi In, or Assembly of Com- 560 SEAS AND LANDS. moners ; but accomplished nothing, and, indeed, had not in them any spirit of reform. For example, they rejected the proposals to abolish hara-kiri and the carrying of swords in public, by 200 to 9 and by 213 votes to i respectively. And now both are abolished. The Shiugi In was quietly dissolved, and its place taken in 1871 by the Sa In, or Senate, whose members were appointed by the Prime Minister. This was, of course, not representation at all, nor was the later body of 1875, the Genro In, much of an advance upon the first Senate in that or any other respect ; but the Chihokwan Kwaiji, or "Assembly of Local Officials," marked a clear advance. The Kwaiji met in July 1875, at the Hongwanji (a temple), and was hailed as a decisive token that the promise of 1868 was in process of fulfilment. It consisted, of course, of appointed officials only, but the Government treated it as the mouthpiece of the people, and undoubtedly regarded the method of selection of its members as only temporary. An imperial speech opened the session, and the able Kido (the " brain and pen " of the Restoration) was appointed Gi-cho (President). There were seventy delegates, who were either governors or their deputies. Yet the results of this first session were not at all promising. The Assembly occupied most of its time in discussing a system of roads and bridges laid before it by the Government. The meetings were not opened to the public or to the press, and the publication of the debates by the Govern- THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT. 561 ment did not mitigate the general dissatisfaction which this caused. The Assembly itself showed a conservatism which did not tend to commend it to the people. At the same time its influence was weakened by contrast with the action of some of the citizens of local prominence, who had been brought up to Tokio by the governors to assist with their advice. These met, and drew up a memorial asking for an Assembly founded on popular election. Finally, on October 12. 1881, came the well-known decree establishing a Parliament in 1890. These few particulars of modern Japanese annals are adduced that it may be seen how the nation has come, step by step, if rapidly, to its present advanced ideas of legislative institutions. Even now there is a Parliament but no House of Parliament, in the architectural sense ; for the ceremony of to- day was held in an entirely provisional building, of no external pretensions, and fitted up, interiorly, to be useful rather than ornamental. Originally the Government contemplated the erection of some- what ambitious structures for the Diet. This project, however, was dismissed, lack of time and desire to economise influencing the Government to give the legislators only a temporary home. The sum set aside for the work, $80,000, necessitated that the structure should be of wood, and explains the in- ornate nature of the edifice standing on what was the Hibiya Parade Ground. The estimate was later on trebled, this being rendered necessary by repeated changes of plans and additions, the upshot appearing 2 N 562 SEAS AND LANDS. in a plain substantial edifice, by which a good be- ginning may be made. The tickets for admission to its gateways on this momentous day were eagerly desired, but very sparsely given. It was a new and last proof of the consideration which I have per- sonally met with from all quarters in Japan, that I should have been allotted, without expecting the favour, a very good seat in the gallery of the central hall. Under the clear pale sky of the Japanese autumnal day cold, but brisk and invigorating Tokio had turned out in its tens of thousands to see the Emperor pass to the Hall of Legislation, to declare the first Parliament opened, and so make good the imperial oath taken twenty-one years ago, and since twice renewed. The entire city had been decorated for this great day, after the Japanese manner, with interminable lines of the national banner (a red sun on a white ground) and lines as interminable of paper lanterns, also red and white. Dense throngs of citizens, with their wives and children, filled each side of the streets through which the imperial carriages would pass, and blocked even the side thoroughfares, to watch the magnates and officials proceed to meet his Imperial Majesty ; for every road and alley was gay with nodding plumes and glittering decorations of the Shinnin, Chokunin, and Sonin, dashing along en grande tenue to the point of interest. Troops in brand-new uniforms kept the passage clear, or marched along to their stations with blasts of bugles to keep time, for the THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT. 563 Japanese regiments do not seem to use the drum. The crowds were alert, excited, and sympathetic, but orderly and gentle-tempered, although two rather serious encounters took place with the police, one at the gates of the Russian Legation, and one in the field set apart for jinrikishas. Of course this last-named vehicle was everywhere in requisition, bowling along with two kurumaya ni-nim-biki and every carriage and horse in the capital had also been brought out. But the immediate pre- cincts of the Legislative Palace were sternly kept secluded. At certain bridges and approaches the policemen in blue spectacles with their swords rigorously kept back all not provided with the necessary papers and tickets, and for the most part the uplifting of the steel scabbard across the path of every onrush was quite enough to stay any over- eager sightseers. In one of the very few street brawls occurring in Tokio, we saw the other day two ninsoku fighting with bale-hooks, blood stream- ing from the terrible wounds inflicted. Presently one turned and fled, pursued with murderous intent by his antagonist ; but a small policeman inter- vened, held his sword across the breast of the infuriated coolie, who instantly began to bow, and hiss, and pant out explanatory courtesies, begging permission to annihilate his foe, but instantly cool- ing down when the little officer, with equal or greater politeness, insisted upon objecting to homi- cide, under any circumstances. This kindly, peace- ful, well-behaved crowd has lost the summer colour, 564 SEAS AND LANDS. which made the city so gay. It is almost as sombre and sober as a London mob, in thefuyu no Kimono, the " garments of winter ; " but the faces are alight with pleasure and pride they understand the Tenshi Sama does a grand thing for Dai Nippon to-day. They have put a coping-stone on the swiftly-raised edifice of their new civilisation ; they, too, like the Western nations, will possess a Parliament, a Con- stitution, debates, reports, divisions, ministries, tout le tremblement of high politics. Alas ! these things mean trouble as well as progress. T sigh as I re- flect that they will come some day to their Reform Bills, their compound householder, their lodger fran- chise, and election addresses ; and have, perhaps, their Irish Question and their all-night sittings ! My two rikisha-men wheel me, with a superb final effort, to the great entrance, which is carpeted with crimson, and thronged with gorgeous official per- sonages, dressed, as it seems, principally in cloth of gold and golden chrysanthemums. These, how- ever, are merely the chief attendants of the legis- lative precincts. It is but to cast the gaze round to observe dignitaries of the State, Shinnin, Chokunin, and Sonin, veteran officers of the army and navy, and Court employes, arrayed even more magnificently than these guardians of the halls and passages of Parliament. At the portal I meet my excellent friend Yamada San, Secretary to the Imperial House- hold, whose companionship removes any difficulties as to the proper staircase and the allotted seat. Amid a throng of gay uniforms and dazzling decora- THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT. 565 tions, settling into their places like butterflies in a flower-garden, we reach the Central Hall, and find a kind of opera-box immediately to the left of the throne and raised above it. The usher mentions that it is a little against etiquette to sit higher than the Emperor but, shigata ga nai, " it cannot be helped" and it will be becoming if we keep some- what in the background and abstain from using opera-glasses. The hall is ample and commodious, having a spacious, if plain, interior, painted white, grey, and gold, with a gallery of handsome boxes running round the back, and, below, an amphitheatre containing six kusabi gata, or wedge-shaped sections of seats, each section having forty seats and desks. These confront a raised platform, approached by two stairways on either side of a semicircular rostrum ; and behind this rises the throne, a golden chair placed on a da'is, carpeted with grey and gold, the throne being canopied with heavy hangings of crim- son brocaded silk ornamented with chrysanthemums. The members' seats are of dark wood, upholstered in black leather, but for to-day both Houses will be present here, the Peers upon the right side of the throne, the Commons on the left. Crowning its gold and crimson canopy is a representation of the ancient head-dress of State of the Mikados some- thing resembling a Phrygian cap ; and green silk cords mark off a space on either hand, where presently the Ministers and Court officials will re- spectively take their stand. The central area of the Hall is quite empty as yet, but the gallery-boxes 566 SEAS AND LANDS. are filled, or filling, with such a blaze of gold coats, epaulettes, burnished swords, and decorations that the glories of the Parliament Ushers in embroidered blue coats, red breeches, silk stockings, and gold chrysanthemum badges become paled. Two of these approach the vacant throne with low bows, and place on each side of it a pot of lighted senko, or incense sticks, that the nose of Majesty may be soothed. The King of the Loo-Choo Islands enters now and surveys the scene. What one instantly misses is the presence of the fair sex. Not a woman, of high or low degree, is to be seen about the pre- mises ; even the chairs in the box of the Empress are unused, and an unfortunate American literary lady, who came all the way from New York to report the event, has been denied so much as an approach to the precincts. In this respect the first Parliament of Japan must be pronounced sadly uncivilised ; in all others there is nothing to be found fault with in the aspect of the Hall, while his Imperial Majesty is awaited. From its roof hangs an imposing chandelier, gilded and coloured, with a galaxy of electric lamps ; and the terra-cotta walls, the rich grey and gold carpets, the pure white galleries, panels, and arches, with the splendid hue of the silk- draped throne, make up a most pictorial scene, enriched by the brilliant audi- ence of diplomats, army and navy officers, courtiers, and great officials eagerly expecting the entrance of the Son of Heaven and his newly enrolled councillors. They come ! There is heard outside a fanfare of military music, just as the clock strikes eleven, and THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT. 567 when this is ended the band in the Parliament court- yard strikes up the plaintive strains of the National Anthem of Japan. The Emperor has reached the building, and reposes awhile in the State apartment 19 tsubo large while the Peers and Commons enter and take their places. The Peers of Dai Nippon are led to their seats by Count Ito, all wear- ing their coats of honour deep blue, heavily em- broidered with gold and with the imperial Kiku. It is an effect as of the plumage of pheasants, or a great jeweller's display of gold and diamonds on dark velvet, when these Japanese marquises, counts, and viscounts settle into their side of the amphi- theatre. Then follow the faithful Commons, all to a man in evening costume of the strictest propriety, with tall silk or opera hats. These are marshalled to their places by Mr. Nakashima, the freshly-elected Speaker of the Lower House, a gentleman of dis- tinguished appearance and bearing, who takes his stand below the platform in front of the Commons, as Count Ito posts himself in front of the Japanese Lords. But the Lord High Chamberlain, the Marquis Tokudaija, has by this time informed his Imperial Majesty that all is ready ; and, conducted by that great official and the other Court dignitaries, the Mikado enters through the right door of the elevated platform. At his side, but a little behind, walk the Princes of the Blood Prince Komatsu wearing his Grand Cross of the Bath and immediately before His Majesty paces a grandee carrying a copy of the 568 SEAS AND LANDS. Constitution, wrapped up in green silk powdered with gold chrysanthemums. The Ministers have taken their places on the left of the throne there is Yamagata the soldierly ; Count Saigo, best of kindly hosts and companions ; Viscount Aoki, a statesman of the first ability and resource ; Mr. Mutsu, of the Department of Commerce, with many others whom it is a delight as well as a distinction to num- ber as friends. To the right of his Imperial Majesty stand the great officers of State, and at this juncture, as the Emperor halts before the throne, all the assembly bow profoundly. Ito and Nakashima keep their places at the head of the two wedge- shaped phalanxes of gold and black. The Ministers, the naval and military officers, every person present, is reverentially attentive it is the moment of the Birth of the First Asiatic Parliament ! Count Yamagata hands to the Mikado, with deep obeisance, the speech, written in Hiragana ; and, with clear, decisive tones not free, however, from the half sing-song of all Japanese readers, the Sovereign of Dai-Nippon de- livers the epoch-making sentences of which here is a translation : We hei-eby notify to the members of the House of Peers and of the House of Representatives that the leading features of the various systems of domestic Government We have promoted during the twenty years since Our ascension to the Throne are now almost completed. We earnestly pray that We, aided by the virtue inherited from the Imperial Founder of Our House, and from Our other Imperial Ancestors, and with your co-opera- tion, may unite the past, brighten the future, garner the excellent fruits to.be yielded by the Constitution, and thereby continue to augment the glory of Our Empire, and to display the admirable, THE FIRST ASIATIC PARLIAMENT. 569 loyal, and brave character of Our subjects both at home and abroad. From an early period it has been Our aim to promote amity with all nations, to widen the range of Our foreign commerce, to strengthen the national power ; and it has fortunately happened that Our intercourse and intimacy with the Treaty Powers have continually increased. With regard to the Army and Navy, it is Our aim, with the lapse of years, to secure their perfection, in order that peace at home and with foreign countries may be main- tained. As to the Budget and the various draft laws for the 24th year of Meiji, We order that the Ministers of State shall submit these for the discussion of the Diet. We anticipate that you will impartially and prudently discuss and support these intentions, and that you will set a worthy precedent for the future. The Emperor is dressed in the uniform of a Generalissimo of the army, and wears the broad red Dai-gusho ribbon of the Order of the Rising Sun as his principal decoration. Tall, in com- parison with most of his subjects, having strongly- marked features, watchful dark eyes, a slight beard and moustache, and manners at once gracious yet im- perturbably reserved, the Mikado looks as different from the pictures of his Imperial Ancestors as the spirit governing the proceedings of to-day differs from the ancient Japanese -notions. But truly here, if ever anywhere in the world, The old order changeth, giving place to new. Observe among these gilded Peers one near to Count Ito, wearing his black hair tied with white string into a top-knot, after the antique fashion of the Daimio and Samurai. At the end of the same bench sits his elder brother bald, or else he, too, would wear the mage, for that is Shimazu Saburo, 570 SEAS AND LANDS. of the proud Satsuma clan ; and it was a retainer of that powerful house who cut down Mr. Richard- son and his English friends at Kanagawa, because they dared to cross the pathway of a Japanese Prince. Now all that is left of those turbulent times is Shimazu's top-knot ! It is another Japan you behold, with everything changed except its population and their delightful old-world ways. The hundred and one guns thundering without as Count Ito receives the speech from the Mikado, and retires to his place with it are fired over the grave of Dai-Nippon. A new Japan is definitely born con- stitutional, progressive, energetic, resourceful, sure to become great, and perhaps destined to become almost again as happy as she was of yore. Let the Nations of the West receive and welcome as she deserves this immeasurably ancient Empire, which thus renews her youth in the fountain of constitutional liberties and institutions. With one slight inclination of his august head, the Mikado saluted the vast assembly bending low before him ; and Japan had entered on the list of lands governed by an electoral regime, as his Imperial Majesty passed through a guard of Lancers to his equipage. TOKIO Nov. 20. 1800 CHAPTER XL. HOMEWARD BOUND. THIS good ship Verona, Captain Seymour, was to have started for Nagasaki and Hong Kong to-morrow s January 1 3 ; but " the unexpected " has occurred. News suddenly reached Kobe that Her Majesty's gunboat Pigmy had gone ashore, and badly, in the northern channel of the inland sea ; consequently a request had been telegraphed to Mr. Rickett, the ever-courteous agent of the great company at Yoko- hama who happened to be in Hiogo on extra duty that the Verona would expedite her departure in order to help the little man-of-war. Accordingly, word was circulated that the steamship would set forth a day before her time, and it was " pretty to see " with what alacrity the ship's company hurried their cargo on board in order to get quickly to the scene of disaster. At half-past five, on a dark and windy evening, the Verona s screw began to revolve, and we threaded all night long the mazy archipelagoes of the inland sea. A chain of five great land-locked waters compose this curious and beautiful ocean passage. They are named Nadas, and there follow, counting from east to west, the Isumi, the Harima, the Biugo, the lyo, and the Suwo Nada. The chart 572 SEAS AND LANDS. would give an inexperienced eye the idea of pro- digiously difficult navigation, but the few existing lights are all leading, and the water is everywhere deep, while our skilful captain knew his way per- fectly, by reason of long habitude in these seas. All night, therefore, the Verona went at good speed on her errand of help, and, slacking a little at daybreak for the narrow places, about half-past six we made out the Pigmy, lying at anchor comfortably enough off the little port of Onomichi. She had gone badly upon the tail-end of an island, at high water too ; but having taken 150 tons of stores and ballast out, the little man-of-war had lifted herself off, and was not seriously damaged. We sent boats to her, and Captain Hewitt came on board of us, but only to say that she had no need of assistance, and would proceed alone to Nagasaki, to dock, as soon as she should have cleared away a wire hawser which was fouling her propeller. With a whole day gained, therefore, the Verona saluted the discomfited ship-of-war, and steamed cheerily onward, through the ever varying scenery of the "Nadas." Innumerable islands and islets rise on all sides from the green and glassy waters of the inland sea ; sometimes bare, broken, and precipitous, sometimes clad with forests of fir, and with bamboo-grass, from their sandy sea-rims to their serrated crests. Innumerable towns and villages nestle amid their sunny nooks, or in the valleys of the mainland ; and uncounted junks, fishing-boats, and sampans dot the surface of the HOMEWARD BOUND. 573 placid sea. The islands take all kinds of shapes, appearing now like castles, or fortresses ; now like full-rigged, black-sailed vessels, and then again like vast green velvet cushions laid on a carpet of emerald silk shot with purple. It is an exaggera- tion, no doubt, to call this chain of salt-water lakes " the most beautiful sea in all the world," as some guide-books do. The ^Egean is far lovelier, and so is the western coast of Scotland in summer but, when the sun shines, as it did with us, very fair indeed are the landscapes and seascapes of the " Nadas," and I rejoice to have had my hours of parting from Japan and Japanese friends rendered less melancholy by the grace and gaiety of the last pictures we shall see of the kindly and pleasant land. In the Straits of Shimonoseki through which, by the bye, old Will Adams, of Gillingham, first found his way to the country of the Mikado the Verona dropped her anchor for two ox three hours. This was to let the hot current of the "Kurosiwa" spend itself, for the flood runs at seven knots through these narrows, and makes navigation some- what perilous. Steaming out into the Yellow Sea we found a biting north-wester blowing, with fre- quent snowstorms ; and a somewhat lively move- ment of the vessel ensued ; but we ran all the more speedily down the coast, and entered the picturesque inlet of Nagasaki at 8.30 A.M. of Wednesday, January 14. This town lately so badly scourged by cholera looks the very last place in the East for such a visitation, standing 574 SEAS AND LANDS. as it does amid high hills, which ought to afford a pure water supply, and sanitated by perpetual sea-breezes. Yet every year, or nearly so, the cholera comes over in a Chinese craft from neigh- bouring Shanghai, and decimates these clean and temperate Japanese. The strong and handsome Russian flagship, Admiral Nachimoff, was lying at anchor near us, as well as the Verona's own sister, the Ancona the pair of them together performing the passenger and mail service between Hong Kong and Yokohama, with such admirable regularity, moreover, that one of our officers declared the two steamers " knew their own way." The harbour is land-locked by lofty hills, which were powdered with snow ; and snow or hail fell constantly all the time we lay coaling and getting in cargo. At 5 P. MO of the 1 4th the Verona started for the run of four days which separates Nagasaki from Hong Kong, the most easterly possession of Her Majesty. At 9 P.M. she steamed into the heart of a black and sudden north-westerly gale, savagely blow- ing down from the Gulf of Pekin, and heaping upon us, as soon as the ship was clear of Me-Sima the "Asses' Ears" all the weight of water of the cold and vast Yellow Sea. A landsman's estimate of a storm is always justly discredited, but Captain Seymour, our very experienced commander, after- wards declared that he had encountered no fiercer wind or more furious seas since 1886. The wind blew, indeed, all night long with a force reaching the hurricane standard, and the waves grew rapidly HOMEWARD BOUND. 575 into such masses of towering weight and speed that the loss of boats and gear was threatened, and the Verona had to be hove-to for six hours. Below was witnessed the usual scene of comic misery every- thing adrift in the cabins ; slippers, books, and water-cans chasing each other round and round, portmanteaus colliding with hat-boxes, stewards staggering about in the saloon with soup in cups, dinner a gymnastic exercise to preserve equilibrium and keep the food on the plates, ladies helplessly succumbing, men grumbling or silent. On deck the green seas time after time fell thundering on sky- lights and hatches, pouring in cascades from the bridges and houses, smashing the bulwarks and boat fenders, and sweeping everything movable into the scuppers. In a less well-found or well-handled vessel there would have been real peril in this tempest ; but Captain Seymour knew his ship, and fought the hurricane with consummate skill and success. Lying in my berth that wild night, I amused myself by verifying an old theory that the Greek phrase, trikAma kakou, does not mean the " third wave of evil," as many great scholars have rendered it, but " the threefold wave of evil." Mr. Swinburne him- self makes the general mistake when he writes of one " Who comes in sight of the third great wave, Which never a swimmer can cross or climb." Watch in hand, I timed, for a long while, swinging to and fro in my berth, the huge beam seas which rolled our boats into the water ; and observation 576 SEAS AND LANDS. proved, as I well knew before, that at periodical intervals there come, in a storm on the ocean, alto- gether, three high dominant billows, the middle one the worst, which are plainly to be distinguished from the minor rollers, and which do all the real mischief to a labouring ship. Comparing notes afterwards with our commander, he assured me that this was certainly true, and that practical navigators look for these recurrent tri-kumata, or " triple surges of evil," just about three times in each hour of any heavy gale. At last, on Thursday morning, after having the lifeboat damaged and the fore-topsail tattered to shreds in the gaskets, we could hold our course again ; and steamed, through a still turbulent sea, for " Turnabout," at the western entrance of the Formosa Channel. This was reached on Friday morning, and we ran down between the mainland of China and the great island of Formosa in gradually softening weather, until the snowstorms and the tempests were fairly left astern. Under the glad- dening sky countless fishing-boats had put out along the yellow and rocky shores with mat-sails and painted prows, and were busy on the dancing, but no longer dangerous waters. The air grew balmy, the sun glittered on the lace-work of the waves, which yesterday was all blinding sea-spume and spin-drift ; the good ship resumed her trim appear- ance, the ladies pale, but reassured crept out again on deck. Saturday, January 17, was a wholly delightful day, and to-morrow (Sunday) we shall HOMEWARD BOUND. 577 thread the Lymoon Pass and anchor in Hong Kong harbour. It was Sunday afternoon, however, before we were moored in the safe and picturesque haven which lies between the island of Hong Kong and the mainland of China, having steamed down the coast past Chapel Rock, the Lammacks, and that curious crag named " Piedra Bianca," which rises solitary out of the open sea to a height of 150 feet, and looks, afar off, just like a junk under full sail. There is, indeed, a story of a British captain who took it for a full-rigged vessel, and, being on the starboard tack, would not give way until he was almost upon it. The entrance to Hong Kong Harbour, between the yellow and green hills, is very striking ; and the anchorage under the terraced streets of Victoria and the lofty Peak affords one of the most busy and thronged spectacles of commerce in all the Eastern seas. The city itself is almost as much British as Chinese, but the pig-tailed people crowd its well-built streets, and in the back regions have altogether their own life and ways, kept sternly in order by the stalwart, bearded Sikh policemen, in red turbans. Parsees and Bohra mer- chants from Bombay ; Malays, Klings, and Lascars ; sailors of every flag and from every imaginable region, mingle with the motley local populace upon the quays and streets. A Babel of tongues announces this for what it is one of the central emporia of the Eastern world ; and pleasant enough, as well as amusing, is Hong Kong at the present season with 2 o 578 SEAS AND LANDS. its variegated population and splendid natural sur- roundings. In summer it grows intolerably hot, lying in so deep a granite oven under the over- hanging Peak of 1600 feet altitude. But in what is called the "winter" here weather resembling our mid-June the air is clear, cool, and sunny, and the Botanical Gardens are to-day in full floral beauty. Wandering there we see the trees and blossoms of all parts of the earth, assembled like its people. I notice the " silky oaks " of Australia, and the candle-berry tree aleurites triloba of Madagascar, side by side with the coral bush from Brazil, coffee shrubs in full bloom from Ceylon, fan-palms, and date-palms, mango-trees, and the beautiful bougainvilliers which make Bombay so splendid in the cold weather. Moreover, there is a more diverse and populous bird-life in these gardens to be seen in one morning than dear but desolate Japan can show in a week, and from end to end of a whole province. In the aviaries are gold and silver pheasants, the bleeding-breasted pigeon, and doves of all sorts, while the thickets of spiraea, terminalia, crotons, and tea bushes are full of China starlings, magpies, tits, finches, rice- birds, white linnets, and the China robin a hand- some fellow, with a white bar across his wings. Above the well-kept gardens an extraordinary little railway carries people to the top of the peak. The ascent is steeper than the roof of a house, and the climb one of 1500 feet perhaps a mile or so in distance ; but by means of a steel rope, which HOMEWARD BOUND. 579 lowers one carriage while it hoists the other, you go gaily and safely up a slope where a cat would slip, and passing two little stations, the " Church," and the " Tennis ground," arrive at the upper shed, where the machinery works. Thence to the hotel, on the summit, and the various residential refuges, where Hong Kongers keep cool in the fierce summer, is a short walk ; while below you, on one side, stretches the illimitable North Pacific, beyond a long outlying chain of islands ; on the other lies the large and busy harbour crowded with shipping, and the pros- perous city of Victoria. She is celebrating to-day her Jubilee, the fiftieth birthday of the colony, and good reason indeed has Britain to be proud of this her farthest-removed Eastern daughter, who in half a century has grown to a population of 200,000 souls, a shipping entry of 6,000,000 tons, and an export trade of ^40,000,000 annually. Peaceful, however, and prosperous as it all is, where fifty years ago piracy and barbarism pre- vailed, the old Mongolian savagery and crime are still latent, and break out sometimes. There lies in sight of our hotel a well-built merchant steamer, the Namoa, trading to Formosa. Only a fortnight ago she put out with 250 Chinese passengers on board, her captain little dreaming that fifty of them, coming on board so meekly with their tickets and bundles, were desperate ruffians, armed with pistols, knives, and stink-pots. At tiffin, on the first day of the voyage, these scoundrels suddenly rose, shot dead a sea-sick passenger who was giving the alarm, 5 So SEAS AND LANDS. as well as the captain on his bridge ; barricaded all the honest Chinamen into one part of the ship, and the passengers, officers, and crew into the other ; and then looted the vessel from stem to stern, appro- priating 25,000 dollars and all portable valuables. These they took off into a couple of junks waiting close by, and left the plundered steamer to creep back again to Hong Kong, with her dead men and her rifled hold. The blood and bullet-marks were still visible when I went on board. Her Majesty's ship Linnet was sent out after the pirates, who were certainly Hong Kong men, but thus far none have been captured. They are probably, to-day, counting and chinking their " Mexicans " placidly in some of the "hongs" at hand. The bland and pigtailed A-foo, in blue gown and embroidered shoes, who points out the ship to you, may, perhaps, know all about the plot and the plunder. The Pekin, which takes us forward from Hong Kong, has for a pas- senger the chief engineer of the Namoa. One of the pirates put a pistol to his heart and pulled the trigger. He struck the barrel up, and the bullet cut off his moustache and eyebrow a narrow shave ! On January 22 we steamed out of Hong Kong in the Peninsular and Oriental steamship Pekin, a fine vessel of the old comfortable type, with cabins On deck, of about 4000 tons, Captain Harris command- ing. The course goes west of south between the Cochin-China Coast and the Paracels, that perilous group of islets and reefs, which, lying in the mid- path of all the typhoons, has wrecked many and HOMEWARD BOUND. 581 many a stormed- tossed ship. Possibly enough Her Majesty's ship Wasp was lost there. Fishing-junks, always in couples, dot the deep-blue sea, and the flying-fish now appears, starting up from the furrows of the ocean as quails do from the rice-fields. Some leap on board, and I preserve their alar fins, which are real membranous wings, and perform true night. During three warm and pleasant, though cloudy, days, the Pekin traversed the dark-blue waters of the China Sea, with the north-east monsoon blowing so steadily astern that throughout this interval we never shifted a brace or started a single inch in any sheet of the square sails. Thus, although the engines were going easily, and the ship was only burning forty-eight tons of coal a day, the north- easter and a southerly current made our diurnal run good. We sighted the Cochin China coast at Cape Varela, and scarcely lost sight of it again until the light on Cape Padaran, established by the French, twinkled over the midnight waves. A full moon made the darkness silvery, and here in the very pathway and breeding-place of typhoons we had as comfortable a passage as could be wished. They mostly start somewhere about the Philippine Islands, whirl their wild course up the Gulf of Tonquin, and then deflect to ravage Formosa, the waters of the Yellow Sea, and the coasts of Japan. The season for them is from August, or even July, to October. As we approach nearer the equator, and pass the curious " Shoe Rock " and the mouths of the Cam- 582 SEAS AND LANDS. bodia River, the air grows very sensibly warmer, and the north-east monsoon blows itself gradually out. A superb sunset delights all eyes on the evening of January 24, the day dying away in glory unspeak- able at the far end of the Gulf of Siam, and the last of the strong winter wind, now become mild and balmy, wafting us over the latest ripples of the China swell. Amcenitas versus fecit, of which these are two : " Tangled and torn, the white sea-laces Broider the breast of the Indian deep ; Lifted aloft, the strong screw races, To slacken and grind in the waves that leap ; The great sails strain ; the broad bows shiver To green and silver the purple sea ; And, forth from the sunset, a dancing River Flows, broken gold, where our ship goes free. Too free ! too fast ! With memories laden, I gaze to the Northward, where lies Japan. You are there so far ! friend, teacher, and maiden ! Haru and Mina and Yoshi San ! You are under that sky by the storm-wind shaken, A thousand ri, as the sea-gull flies ; As if it were Death, not Time, had taken Our eyes away from your gentle eyes." We made the outlying islands which announce the Straits of Singapore on the morning of January 26, and steaming past the town and the roadstead, shining and calm, full of shipping, threaded a narrow passage of exquisite beauty, we moored at the Peninsular and Oriental wharf, amid hills covered with palm groves, thickets of the flowering scarlet HOMEWARD BOUND. 583 hibiscus, and Malay villages built on piles. Singa- pore basks amid an almost eternal sunshine, tempered by daily equatorial rainstorms a bright and busy city, planted on sheltered seas, and embosomed in the richest verdure. About half the population seems to consist of Chinese, who almost monopolise trade and business. The city and country roads are excellent, the red soil binding into broad and level ways, along which jinrikishas, and gharries drawn by sturdy little Pegu ponies, whirl you gaily along. Our first visit was to the Botanical Gardens, which are even more beautiful in aspect than those of Peradenia at Candy, and nearly as rich in sylvan and floral wealth. The Director and a friend, who occupy separate houses in the heart of these enchanting gardens, seemed to be living in a perfect botanical paradise. Conspicuous among a hundred notable trees around, were the " Traveller's Palm," which grows so gracefully in the form of a vast widespread fan, and has its stem full of sweet water ; and the mangosteen, on the exquisite fruit of which we breakfasted next day. From the gardens I drove to the house of the Dutch Consul-General, Mr. Lavino ; and there found, just starting for China and Japan, my old friend, Lord Connemara, the most energetic, successful, and popular governor Madras has ever known. We talked together about India so long that the night had fallen before I could get away, and fireflies and tropical lightning guided my dog- cart home along the dark green lanes of Singapore. At the Director's house we played with some curi- 584 SEAS AND LANDS. ous domestic pets, among them a binturong and a "wah-wah" monkey. This last was a delightful little creature, with very long silky arms and soft melancholy eyes. It frequents the Malay forests, and utters its plaintive cry of " wah-wah " in a sad scale of ascending notes. Trim and neat as the Singapore Gardens were, and populous as the adjoining city is, the Director could point to a neighbouring hill where there is always to be found a pair of tigers ; and these beasts often swim over the Straits from the adjacent island and pick up a China or Malay man in the woods. At Singapore we took on board for Colombo and India a very distinguished friend, Admiral Sir Nowell Salmon, V.C., returning with his family and suite from the command of Her Majesty's China squadron. The good ship Pekin now steamed pleasantly forward through the lovely Straits of Malacca. They were hot, of course, but the tropical glow seemed welcome after the snowstorms of Nagasaki and the incle- mencies of the Yellow Sea. Past " pulo " after " pulo" as these fair islets are called of delicious, glittering beauty, fringed with palms, and rising from a sea of silver and green, the Pekin leisurely sped ; for you must enter Penang roadstead in day- light, and we had time to spare. The town of Penang has little to offer to the notice of the passing traveller except a waterfall, which is too often, as now, destitute of water, and the usual mixed popu- lation of Malays, Klings, and Chinese found all along the Peninsula. Its naturally charming aspect HOMEWARD BOUND. 587 is spoiled by a hideous pile of Government offices, erected by an Engineer officer, who, it is to be hoped, was a better soldier than architect. At Penang our stay was limited, but proved longer than usual on account of a lighter-boat, full of tin ingots, which got aground in coming off to us. On January 30, at 2 P.M., we started again and threaded a labyrinth of fishing-stakes, junks, and proas on our way to go by Acheen Head across the bottom of the Bay of Bengal to Colombo. It is a run of four days and a half, during which you sight the grand " Golden Mountain " of Sumatra, and discern very plainly the rich shores and outlying groups of that splendid island. The " Golden Mountain " rises a little way inland, to the height of 7, 800 feet, and is so symme- trical in outline as almost to recall the stately per- fection of Fuji-San. It was interesting to coast along the green rolling hills of Sumatra, and to see the Dutch blockading ships sullenly patrolling those beautiful shores, which they cannot occupy. For eighteen weary years Mynheer has been waging a hopeless war against the Achinese, which never would have commenced if Mr. Gladstone had not injudiciously abandoned the Sultan to the Dutch- men one of the many mistakes of his Colonial policy. They have lost thousands of lives and spent unnumbered guelders fighting the climate and the Sumatran Muslims ; and at the end of it all, are penned up to-day in Acheen, potted by lurking Malay -sharpshooters whenever they stray beyond their fortified posts. The very lighthouse on Acheen 588 SEAS AND LANDS. Head has to be guarded by a bomb-proof block- house, where twelve soldiers are always kept ; and every night at sundown boats are manned and sent round and inside the bays and inlets to keep out contraband muskets and munitions. But the natives have learned how to manufacture guns and gun- powder for themselves, and would probably drive out the Dutch eventually, except that the blockade keeps them from selling their pepper ; and being thus terribly short of cash, they may have at last to yield, or to take entirely to their hills. It is this for which the Hollanders are now waiting so I was told by a Dutch captain of one of their men-of-war, who sailed with us from Singapore to Colombo ; but such a policy of lingering and phlegmatic hos- tility paralyses the trade and prosperity of the splendid Sumatran peninsula, and it is a pity for everybody concerned that the Achinese cannot do what they ardently desire, by placing themselves under the protection of the British flag, due arrangements being made to soothe the pride of the retiring Power. The PeJcin took her time in crossing the bottom of the Bay of Bengal, for she had a day in hand, and did not wish to enter Colombo Harbour in the dark. At Colombo we personally finished our cir- cumnavigation of the globe, having previously visited Ceylon from the side of India. The wonderful leafy lanes, and dark interminable groves of palm, which make the environs of Colombo one vast magnificent hot-house, were, therefore, not new to our none the HOMEWARD BOUND. 591 less delighted eyes. Ceylon is, in t.uth, an earthly heaven for botanists ; for fruit, for flowers, and above all, for glorious and beautiful tropical trees. A drive of seven miles which we took to an ancient Buddhist temple showed on the way nearly every known specimen of equatorial vegetation, and it was especially good to see how the cultivation of the bread-fruit tree is increasing. Good, also, to see with what irrepressible energy British soldiers were playing football on the maidan with the ther- mometer at 87. From Colombo our sea-road to Aden, Port Said, and Marseilles is too well known and too often traversed to call for extended remarks. In my " India Revisited " I have myself described the voyage homewards over the Arabian Sea. We passed, on board the Peninsular and Oriental steamer Ravenna into which vessel we shifted at Colombo between the Maldives and Laccadives, guided by the excellent light on Minekoi Island ; and after six days' further steaming over peaceful seas, made our way between Cape Guardafui and the Island of Socotra to brown, bare, and burning Aden. ADEN, February 13, 1891. It is from this Arabian cinder-hole, so ugly and so useful, that I despatch to you this last of my desultory letters. What remains of our journey homeward by the Red Sea, the Canal, and Mar- seilles is all well known, and there hangs above 592 SEAS AND LANDS. us a horrible chance, moreover, that we may be quarantined for a fortnight in Egypt, on account of the small-pox which was raging in Colombo when we left. It only remains to remark that no sea-voyage can well be more interesting or more health-giving than this which the steamships of the great Peninsular and Oriental Company render so easy and so pleasant. Thanks to its excellent arrangements, we have sailed over ten thousand miles of changeful ocean through seven great seas and four straits without a moment's apprehension or difficulty ; finding always the most courteous and skilful officers, admirable accommodation, a bounti- ful table, and the best of good casual company. To be under the flag of the ''Unofficial Fleet" of the British Empire for such the Peninsular and Oriental may be styled seems, indeed, always to me to be already half at home. Yet, after steaming round the entire coast-line of the Continent of Asia, from Japan to Syria, one longs for dry land at last, and I shall be glad very glad to tread again the familiar pavements of Fleet Street. INDEX. ABACUS, the, 322 Achinese, the, their desire to be placed under the British flag, 591 Adams, President, 64 Adams, Will, 169, 170 ; his visit to Japan, 573 Aden, 592 Admiral Nachimo/, the flagship, 574 Ah-Fat, Chinese attendant, 152, 159 Alaska, 149, 151 America, cars in, 58, 59, 82 ; demo- cracy in, in, 112; sonnet of adieu to, 145; trees in, 118, 119; women in, 112 Amida, images of, 238 Ancona, the, 574 Anson, 151 Anticosti, island of, its dangers, 19 Ants, 284, 289 Araslii-yama, the mountain, 236, 237 ; its cherry blossoms, 273 Ardagh, Miss, poetess, 49 Asakusa, 201 ; Emperor's palace at, 242 ; gathering at palace, 242, 243- 244 Asarum, the, leaf, 221, 224 Astronomy, 280, 281, 283, 288 Atlantic, the North, 7-9, 10, 12, 14; birds of, 12, 13, 15 Awoto, story of, 256, 257 BARKER, Annie Herbert, poetess, 238 Bees, 282, 295 Bdgic, the steamship, 147, 149, 151, *54i 157. 159-161. '64, 169; Dies non on board of, 162 Belleisle Straits, dangers of naviga- tion of, 14, 22 Biwa Lake, 180 , Boston, 91 ; its buildings, 93 ; cars, 92 ; chief cemetery, 93 ; climbing plant, 93 ; parks, 92 ; State- house, 92 ; suburbs, 92, 93 Bloody Foreland, the, 7, 9, 12 British Columbia, climate of, 51 Bruddick, Major Isaac, 98 Buddha, effigy of, near Hase, 257 Buddhism, 203, 285, 289, 302, 311 ; influence of, 231 ; its doctrine, 289 Buddhism, Japanese, 217; compared with Shintoism, 218; its advent, 218 ; its hold of the people, 289 Buddhist priests, 239, 240 ; tem- plette, 234, 235 Buffalo, 119, 1 20 Bunker Hill, its monument, 93 Butsu-do, meaning of, 217 CABOT, no California, Alta, 131 population of, 146 Cambridge, 93 Canada, capital of, 38 ; climate of, 32, 50 ; French poets of, 55, 57 ; history of, 50 ; hogs of, 35, 36 ; literature of, 38 ; her poetry, 44- 46, 48-51, 57 ; her problems, 39; her requirements, 40 Cartier, Jacques, visit to Quebec, 24 Cataracts, the, 42 Ceylon, 591 ; British soldiers in, 591 Chamberlain, Mr. B. H., on Japanese poetry, 252 ; his knowledge of Japanese language, 290 ; a story of, 460 Champlain, Samuel de, 24, 30 Channing, 119 593 2 P 594 INDEX. Cha-no-yu, the, 302, 303, 307, 311 Cha-Sehi, the, 303 Chemistry, 282, 283, 288 Chicago, 122 ; as a railway centre, 123; conflagration in, 122; its commerce, 123 Childs, Mr. G. W., journalist, 77, 7.8 Chinamen, home-going, 152; dead, how shipped home, 153, 155, 156, 164 ; discomforts of home-going, 153-155; as fellow - passengers, 148; as sailors, 152; their desire to be bulled at home, 1 53 ; reasons for this, 1 59 China Town, 154 Chopsticks, 143, 210; how to use, 265 Chrysanthemums, 192, 201, 202, 211, 216, 228, 231, 242, 243; festival of the, 548-550 Cleveland, 120; its gardens, 121; its population, 121; Garfield's burial-place in, 121 Cliff House, 143 Colleges, American, in Colombo, 591 Commerce, 426, 427 Concord, 97, 98 Bridge, 1 14 Confucius, 153 Connaught, Duke and Duchess of, in Japan, 400, 423-425 Connemara, Lord, Governor of Madras, 584 Cook, Captain James, 150 Corean ambassador, 244 Craigie House, 102 Crawford, Isabella Valancey, 46- 48 Crocker, Mr. F., 162 Curzon, Mrs. Sarah Anne, 49 DAIKOKU, picture of, 192 ; temple to, 192 Dai-Nippon, grave of, 570 Daiya-Gawa river, 237 Dana, no Darwin, his books, 285 ; his home, 284 ; his principle of evolution, 282, 289 Deakin, Mr., his emporium, 243 Donner Lake, 131 ; firs near, 131 Dynamite, transit of, 237, 238 EARTHQUAKES, in Japan, 238, 240 ; loss of life by, 241 ; what they have done, 281 Education in Japan, 397 Eliot, Dr. Charles, 94, 95, 103, in, 114 Emerson, 97, 100, 101, 112 ; Carlyle's present to, 99 ; his books, 99 ; his daughter, 97 ; his haunts, 101 ; his house, 99 ; his son, 97 ; his teach- ing, 115; his widow, 100 Emigrants, Methodistand Moravian, 10, ii; to Canada, 2 ; miseries of, 2-4, 9, 10 England, address on, 399 FIDELIS, see Machar Fire-box, see Hibachi Fish, paper, 454 Fuji-San, 427 ; earthquakes caused by, 241 ; government pride in, 340; in sunshine, 422, 425 ; its ascent, 183, 184, 504, 510, 515 ; its beauty, 187, 1 88, 197; its circumference, 509 ; its cone, 208, 258 ; cultiva- tion on, 509 ; its eruptions, 1 82 ; its last eruption, 508 ; its height, 182, 1 88, 507, 508 ; its hump, 182 ; its products, 183; its situation, 182, 183; legends attaching to, 182, 187, 508; model of, 201; poem on, 518-520; slaughter of soldiers on, 556 ; snow upon, 513 ; sunrise on, 516 ; view of, 482, 484 Fuji-Sen-Gen, the goddess, 187, 188 Fujiya, celebrated tea-house, 184 GAGNON, M. Ernest, poet, 55 Garfield, see Cleveland Gast, Pierre de, 30 Geishas, the, 299, 300, 303 Gettysburg, 114 Gladstone, Mr., a mistake of, 588 Goddess of storms, 158 Golden Gate, the, 144, 145 Gompachi and Ko-Murasaki, loves of, 494, 498 Grant, Ulysses S., 78; his grave, 85 INDEX. 595 Great Hell, the, its deadly influ- ence, 482, 483 ; volcano of, 482 Greely, General, 73, 74 HAKONE, Lake of, 480, 484 ; moun- tains of, 480 Hall of Three Buddhas, see Sambut- sudo Hamilton, Lord George, 364 Harland & Wolff as shipbuilders, 151 Harris, Captain, of the Ptkin, 581 John, founder of city, 63 Harrison, Mrs., 49 President, 69, 70, 71 Haruna, Lake, 528 ; vale, 528 ; vil- lage, 528 Harvard, its arboretum, 108 ; its observatory, 107, 108 Rev. John, 94 ; his bequest, 105 ; his library, 105 ; his place of death, 105 University, 93, 94, 103, 105, 1 06; colleges in, 104; expenses in, 105 ; its academic buildings, 94 ; its gymnasium, 104, 107 ; its lands, 94 ; its library, 94, 108 ; its me- morial hall, 94, 114 ; its statutes, 107, 109 ; its students, 94, 106 ; its teachers, 94 ; its teaching, 109 ; its wealth, 106 Hashi, see Chopsticks Hawthorne, house of, 99 Hiakuninshiu, volume of poetry, 255 Hibachi, the, importance of, 375-386 Hidari Jingoro, his wonderful carved image, 268 Hideyoshi, Taikoon, 303, 304, 311, 312 Hitchcock, Mr., 346 Hoar, Judge, 97 Hong Kong, 577 ; bird life in, 578, 579 ; its peak, 579 ; its trees, 578 ; pirates in, 580 ; population of, 579 Honolulu, 162 Horseshoe, the, 41, 43 Ho-yei-yan, hump of Fuji-San, 180 IKAO, ascent of, 527 ; spring of, 528 Imai-cho, 317 Inare\ deity of the rice plant, 477 Inari-Sama, the deity, 494 India, literature of, 115 Ingles, Captain, R.N., 412, 413, 515, 521 Inouye, Count, sacrifice of, 441 Iowa, State of, 123 Ito, Count, 570 ; his house, 363 ; founder of modern Japan, 363, 364, 365 Countess, 364, 365 JAPAN, 165 ablution in, 406 a dinner in, 263 ; guests at, 264 afternoon in, 417 agriculture in, 215 arrival of Dutch in, 427 arrival of Portuguese in, 427 art in, 339, 367 art store in, 349, 351, 352, 353 as a place of rest, 334 as England's equal, 443 arrival of English ships in, 427 babies in, 178, 192, 194, 207, 217, 231 ball in, 359, 360 baneful influence of Portuguese Jesuits in, 428, 429 bank-notes, 192 bathing in, 180, 212, 323, 324,462, 527, 53i bath man in, 179 bathrooms in, 461 baths in, 461-463, 532 bedtime in, 402 bell-ringing in, 316 birds in, 234, 495 Bishop of, 321 bluejackets of, 413, 449 British influence in, 436, 445 British influence, by whom repre- sented, 436, 437 British traders in, 444 Buddhism in, 217 ; entrance of, 244 butterflies in, 533 ; superstition about, 491 buying in, 353 cakes in, 180, 203 children in, 194, 198, 199, 207, 231, 232 children in, precocity of, 207, 208 children in, where to be seen, 199 596 INDEX. JAPAN cholera in, 536-544, 574 cholera in, mortality from, 543 civilisation in, 287, 446 civil laws, 436 climate of, 458 Cloisonne" work in, 350, 35 1 consular jurisdiction in, 434 cook in, 322 cooks' dress in, 321, 322 coolies in, 1 78 country girl in, 176, 177 court dress in, 243 criminal laws in, 436 cups in, 1 8o ; 203 dancers in, 268, 269, 270, 273, 299 dancing in, 359, 360 dark age in, 368 day in, 495 dinner in, 260, 266, 297, 301 discoverer of, 169 diseases of, 461, 462, 463 drawing-room in, 315 dressing in, 404, 405 eating in, 260 education in, 397-399 Emperor of, see Mikado esteem of women in, 344, 345 etiquette in, 270, 239, 406, 407, 420 Exhibition in, 366, 368, 369, 370, 371, 400, 447 exports of, 367 fancy-dress dance in, 335 fans in, 470 farming in, 454 Festival of the Dead in, 486 feudalism in, 367, 368 fish in, 485 fishermen in, 178, 194 fishing in, 454 florists in, 202, 203 flowers in, 192, 467-475, 494, 495 folding screen in, 351, 352 games in, 333, 336, 402, 403 gardener in, 322 girls' dress in, 300 government in, 443 hair-dressing in, 264 hair of women in, 177, 194 head-dress in, 328 her boats, 159 JAPAN-' her Constitution, 440 her fishing craft, 166 her flag, 166 her foreign commerce, 443, 444 her foreign merchants, 444 her negotiations, 439 her passports, 206, 445 her political relationship, 426 sailors of, 170 supreme court of, 442 holy books in, 472 home in, 330, 428 houses in, 197, 317 ice beverage in, 487 inn in, 209 ; bedroom in, 21 1 ; beds in, 2ii ; customs, 209, 211; en- tertainment in, 210, 211 invasion of, annals of, 556, 557 ivory-work in, 347, 348 joiner in, 452 judges in, 444, 445 lacquer-work in, 346 lady of, 175, 176 lady's pillow in, 327 language in, 203, 204, 330 lanterns in, used for dead, 489, 490 laughter in, 232, 233 law of election in, 387, 388, 389, 390 laws in, 433 legends of, 245, 246, 268, 384, 455, 473, 488, 489, 496 life in, 337, 408, 409 love-song of, 337 manners in, 307 mat- making in, 341 maturity in, 499 meals in, 406, 407 medicine in, 409 medicines used in, 459-464 men's dress in, 194 men-of-war at, 166 metropolis of, 318 mineral springs in, 462, 478, 481, 482, 526, 534 miller in, 179 morning in, 406 museums of, 197, 232, 264 mythology of, 280 new Parliament in, 354, 386, 558, 561 ; central hall for, 574 INDEX. 597 JAPAN oxen in, 194 painting in, 452 physician in, 178, 409 photography in, 479 pin trade in, 324 poetry in, 250, 252, 255, 333, 341, 342 poetry, specimen of, 251 poets of, 255 policemen in, 194, 450 population of, 366, 379 porcelain in, 433 postmen in, 194 potters in, 45 1 presents in, 333 priests of, 450 reception in, 420, 421, 422 religions of, 217 review of forces in, 410-423 rising in, 404 roads in, 236 sculpture in, 453, 454 shampooer in, 178, 179, 212, 457 Shinto priests in, 217 Shinto temple in, 217, 218, 234 shopping in, 353 shops in, 180, 197, 318 shrimps in, 180 shutters in, 212 sin cures in, 496, 497 sleeping in, 476 smoking in, 203, 379 soldiers in, 194, 419 ; their uni- form, 419, 449, 450 songs of, children's, 198, 199 special picture in, 452, 453 spirit of her people, 192, 193, 197, 204 summer in, 486, 487 tattooing in, 470, 477 tea in, 294, 295 tea-drinking in, 184, 203, 294, 297, 303. 307, 308 tea-making in, 307, 308 theatres in. 246, 249, 250 the fox in, 462, 463 the Great National Exhibition in, 447 ; admission to it, 450 the supernatural, how regarded in, 488 the tariff question, 434, 435 JAPAN treaty with Great Britain, 428 trees in, 215, 233, 239, 357 vases of Cloisonne 1 in, 350 vegetation in, 215, 234, 317, 318 vehicles in, 1 77, 1 78 vehicle- pullers in, 177 viands in, 270, 402, 456 women in, 334, 345 wood of, 478 wood-carving in, 352 ; where may be seen, 353 bridge, see Nihombashi the Empress of, her appear- ance, her birth, her child, her qualities, 555 Japanese, the, as a race. 358 as pedestrians, 525 character of, 333 dress of, 197 feet of, 237 manners of, 178, 205, 206, 244, 334 speech of, 252, 330 temper of, 435, 436, 446 their joiner-work, 451, 452 their love of flowers, 192, 217 the stability of, 430 the turnery of, 451, 452 their under-linen, 461 Jersey, 85 ; its park, 85 ; its pave- ment, 85 Jinrikisha, 171, 178, 535 Jinrikisha men, 171,178, 233 ; speed of, 212, 216 ; scars on, 460 ; strength of, 535 Jizo, the god, 485 Johnson, Miss Pauline, poetess, 49 Jones, Miss K. L., poetess, 53 Joss-papers, 158, 159 KA-KI, fruit of, 208 Kamada, its plum-blossoms, 192 Kama-Kura, 256 ; its Buddha figure, 256 ; its Buddhist shrines, 256 ; its Shinto shrines, 256 Kagura, the, dance, 226, 227 Karuizawa, summer resort in Japan, 534 Ki-ku, the imperial blossom, 207 Kimono, the, 175 ; the use of. 178 Kin Riu Yan, temple of, 199 ; wor- ship in, 200 ; its gods, 200, 201 ; 598 INDEX. gold image in, 199 ; grounds within, 20 1 ; pilgrims to, 200 Kioto, see Arashi-yama Kiss of brotherhood, 308 Knowledge, lecture on modern, 279 Koi, the, fish, 454, 455 ; legend of, 455 Kosei, its mineral spring, 534 Kuroda, Count, 204 Countess, 203 ; dress of, 203 Kurosiwa, the, 573 ; its speed, 573 Kuruma, the, vehicle, 177, 178; value of, 534 Kuruma-yu, see Jinrikisha Kwannon Sama, goddess, image of, 199 LANMAN, Mr. Charles E.. 108 Lavino, Mr., Consul in Singapore, 584 Leprohon, Mrs., poetess, 49 Liberty, statue of, 115 Lighthall, Mr., poet, 52 Literature, English, 288 Liverpool docks, 3 Loch Swilly, 4 Lockyer, Norman, on colours, 289 Londonderry, wall of, 5 ; siege of, 4 ; Macaulay's account of the siege, 5, 6 Longfellow, his arm-chair, 102 ; his daughter, 101 ; his poems, 101, 102 ; his portrait, 102 ; dwelling of, 101 Lubbock, Sir John, 283 ; his ant- house, 284 ; his researches, 283 ; on bees, 283 Lundy, 6 MACHAR, Agnes Maude, Canadian, poetess, 49 Macleur, Kate Seymour, Canadian poetess, 49 Magee, Mr., purser of the Belgic, 163 Mahdbhdrata, passage in the, 491 Makura, the, 327 Man, his growth, 286 ManydsMu, poetic work, 255 Matter, as resolved by the chemist, 282 Maumont, sword of, 7 Mayflower, the, 115 M'Lachlan, poet, 54 Men, American, 112 Mikado, the, 547 ; as a monarch, 555> SS^ ; description of, 552 ; etiquette attending, 553 ; his birth, 554 ; his bow, 553 ; dress of, 553, 569 ; his name, 554 ; his troops, 562, 563 ; succession to throne of, 554 Mikado Nintoku, legend about, 384 Mioken, shrine to, 193 Mississippi, the, 123 Miyanoshita as a centre for explora- tions, 480 ; as a glen, 478 ; as a village, 478 ; its hot spring, 478 ; its industry, 478 ; its surrounding mountains, 479 ; sturdiness of its citizens, 479 Mongolian voyagers, 155 ; their domino-playing, 158 Monkey, the, of Malay forests, 584 Montreal, 20, 28-40 ; its elbow-room, 29 ; its food supply, 29 ; its gar- dens, 32 ; Bed Indians in, 29 ; its telegraph poles, 32 Moore, his boat-song, 35 Mosquitoes in Tokio, 476 ; nets for, 476 Moxa, the, treatment, 459 Mugwort, 459, 460 Mukdjima, the cherry-tree avenue, 473 Musumes, 336 ; duties of, 406 NADAS, the, its chain of waters, 571, 573 ; landscapes and seascapes of, 573 Nagasaki, 574 Nagoya, 414 ; its castle, 414 ; its inhabitants, 414 ; its streets, 414 Namikawa of Tokio, 350 Nangasaque,i7O Nebraska, 124, 126 Negro, the, population in America, 75. 76 Nevada, her mines, 130 New Brunswick, its catholicity, 21 New Haven, 90 ; its commerce, 91 ; its institutions, 90 ; its manufac- tures, 91 ; its situation, 91 ; its trees, 90 Newton, his teaching, 280 INDEX. 599 Niagara, 41 Nichiren, St., temple to, 192 Nihombashi as a road centre, 471 Nikko, 205, 206, 212 ; its height, 216 ; its produce, 216 ; its temples and tombs, 217, 2iS, 221, 222, 223, 233 ; country round, 228 ; mountains round, 221 ; proverb of, 217 ; why famed, 221, 222, 223 Ninsoku, the sturdiness of, 497, 498 Nippon, 450 ; holiday at, 469 ; the hills of, 522 Nobunaga on Christianity in Japan, 428 Norton, Professor Charles E., 108 FUKU SAN, 319 ; on the Jour des Marts, 491 O Jigoku, see Great Hell Okuma, Count, 204 ; his scheme, 438 ; the sacrifice of, 441 Okura, Mr., banquet by, 298, 299 Omaha, 124 O Take San, 184, 227 PACIFIC Ocean, the, 143, 149 Parkes, Sir Harry, in Japan, 436, 437 ; reference to, 443 Pekin, the steamship, 581 Penang, 587 ; its aspect, 587 ; its waterfall, 587 Penn, cottage of, 77 Percy, Lord, 99 Persimmon, see Ka-ki Philadelphia, 76 ; Girard College in, 76, 77 ; its town-hall, 76 Pickering, Edward, 107 Pigmy, the, warship, 571, 572 Plunkett, Sir Francis, in Japan, 437 ; reference to, 443 Prairie, the, 124, 125 ; its dogs, 125, 126; owls in, 126 Pullman cars, 117 QUEBEC, her catholicity, 21 ; her founder, 24 ; her language, 23 ; her site, 24 ; her streams, 21 ; her title, 24 RANCHING, 128 Red Indians, 29, 128, 129 Reno, 129 Rice, 53 ; Rice, cultivation of, 2 1 5 ; high price of, 471 Rice-god, see Inard Rice-wine, 456 ixichardson, Mr., fate of, 570 Roaring Meg, the gun, 6 Robinson Crusoe, 115 Rothwell, Annie, Canadian poetess 49 SAIGON, Count, 299, 360, 364 Sake, 304 ; meaning of, 236 Salisbury, Lord, his responsibility, 443 Salmon, Admiral Sir Nowell, V.C., 384 Salt Lake, 127, 128 Samisen, the, 184, 212 Sambutsado, 222-227 Sandwich Islands, 148 Sanetomo, lover of poetry, 257 San Francisco, 132, 133; discovery of gold at, 134 ; its birth, 134 ; its cars, 137 ; its first trade, 134 ; its people, 137 ; its soil, 139 ; its streets, 137; opium-smoking in, 139. MO San Francisco, China city in, 138; apothecary shops in, 141, 142 ; food in, 141 ; habits of Chinese in, 139 ; morality in, 142 ; popula- tion of, 143 ; smoking in, 139, 140 ; theatre of, 142 Sanskrit, 109, 113 Satow, Mr. C. M. G., on Buddhism, 2l8, 221 Science, beckoning onwards, 282 Seikasha, the, 304 Sen-no-rikiu, 265, 311 Seranus, see Harrison Seymour, Captain, of the Verona, 571,575 Shelley, MS. of, 108 Sherman, General, quotations from, 86-89 Shiba, 218, 221 Shichi-taki Cascades, its mountain tea-house, 233, 236 Shimonoseki, Straits of, 573 Shinagawa, 192 ; her fishermen, 192 6oo INDEX. Shinto, meaning of, 217; the reli- gion of the State, 217 ; charms, 224, 226 Shiyoku, tomb of the, 498 Shogunites, defeat of, 364 Shogun, the, Sanetomo, his love of poetry, 385 Shoguns, the, 218; crest of, 221, 224 ; full of, 559, 560 ; tombs of, 221, 224 Shoji, the, 187 Shuko, 303 Signal office, the meteorological, 74 Silk, 511, 533 Singapore, 583 ; its botanic gardens, 583 ; its population, 583 Smith, Mr. William Wye, poet, 51 Smith, Professor Goldwin, 38 Snow -sheds, 131 Spectroscope, the power of the, 281 Stadicona, the village of, 24 Statesmen, American and Roman, no Stanley, Lady, 29 Steamships, the P. and O., 592 Steps, hundred and one, 184, 187 St. Lawrence, the, 19, 26, 31 ; Gulf of the, difficulties of navigating, i, 16; its icebergs, 16-18 St. Louis, 23 Store, largest in the States, 78 Straits of Malacca, 584, 587 Sugar-maple, 118 Sui-Giyo, sin water-cure, 496 Sumatra, its Golden Mountain, 587 ; height of, 587 ; symmetry of, 587 Sumi, the, 308 Sun, the, compared with Sirius, 280 Swinburne, Mr., his mistake, 576 Sylvester, Professor, his investiga- tions, 289 TEA, 303 Tea-leaf, the, 302, 312 Tea-pavilion, 303 Tea-plant, the, 302 Thomas, General, 87, 88 Thomson, Sir William, his investi- gations, 289 Tobacco, 183, 191 Tokio, 191, 316, 319 ; amusements in, 336; baths in, 461 ; castle, J 93 5 Club, speech at the, 274, 275-277 ; conflagrations in, 391- 397 ; covered with volcanic ash, 509 ; earthquakes at, 240 ; Exhi- bition in, 249 ; housebreaking in, 403 ; mosquitoes in, 476 ; new hotel in, 371 ; Parliament-house in, 204 ; population of, 193, 284 ; size of, 193; streets of, 194; temples in, 218 Toronto, 32 ; atmosphere of, 33 ; boat-song of, 35 ; fields, 34 ; popu lation of, 33 ; situation of, 36, 38 ; snake-fences in, 33 ; streets f> 37) 38, 39 ; wild plants in, 34 ; University, 38 Toronto, Lake of, 36, 37 Tori Yoshida, 324, 328 Treaty revision, its international interest, 424, 425 Truckee, the, 129 Tsuji, Mr., remarks of, 290 Tsurumi, its rice-fields, 191 ; reap- ing of the same, 191 ; its radish- fields, 191 Tub, the, as a bath, 461 Tyndall, Professor, his experiments 283 ; on sounds, 289 Typhoons, breeding- place of, 582 ; season of, 582 UEAMI, the waterfall, 236, 237 Urashima, 245 ; his burial-place, 246 Utah desert, 128, 129 Utsunomtya, 208 ; inn at, 209-212 ; the pool, 237 Uyeno Park, its historical memories, 447, 448 ; its temple, 447 VEKONA, the, 571, 573, 575 Voyage, longest, without sighting land, 149, 150 WALDEN Pond, 100, 101 Walker, Captain, of the Bdgic, 152, 160, 161 Walker, Rev. George, his valour, 5 ; statue of, 5 Wanamaker, Mr., Postmaster-Gene- ral, 78 INDEX. 601 Washington, 58 ; its memories of Sumner, Seward, Lincoln, Gar- field, Jackson, and Farragut, 63 Washington, the White House, 64-73 Washington, dwelling of, 101 ; statue of, 72, 77 Watanabe Shuzo, 322 ; his dress, 322 ; his duty, 322 Webster, Daniel, 72 Wellington, Duke of, 364 Whitman, Walt, poet, 78, 81, 82-84 ; his dwelling, 82 Whitney, Dr., on acu - puncture, 460 Whittier, Mr., poet, 95-97 Winsor, Mr. Justin, 108 Wolfe, Quebec conquered by, 23, 25 ; his death, 26 ; his monu- ment, 26 YAKU-SHI, temple of, 496 Yale College, 90 Yamagata, Count, 358, 363 Yeddo, see Tokio Yokohama, 172, 178 ; clogs worn in, 175; her roadways, 172 Yomei Mon, the gate, 225 Yoshi-tsune', Regent, 303 THE END. PRINTED BY BALLANTVNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON. WORKS BY SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, K.C.I.E. presentation Bfcttton. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD; Or, THE GREAT CONSUMMATION. A POEM. 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