Japan

It was a ten minutes' walk, the next morning, from the inn down to the boat: an everwinding path along a succession of terraces studded with trees just breaking into leaf, and dotted with cottages, whose folk gave us good-day as we passed. The site of the village sloped to the south, its cheek full turned to the sunshine that stole down and kissed it as it lay. On this lovely May morning, amid the slumbering air, it made as amorous a bit of springtide as the heart could wish. In front of us, in vignette, stretched the stream, half a mile of it to where it turned the corner.

The sunshine quickened us all, and our kuruma took the road like a flock of birds; for jinrikisha men in company run as wild geese fly, crisscross. It is an artistic habit, inculcated to court ladies in books on etiquette. To make the men travel either abreast or in Indian file, is simply impossible. After a moment's conformity, they invariably relapse into their own orderly disorder.

Toward the middle of the afternoon we reached a part of the coast locally famous or infamous, for the two were one; a stretch of some miles where the mountains made no apology for falling abruptly into the sea. Sheer for several hundred feet, the shore is here unscalable. Nor did it use to be possible to go round by land, for the cliffs are merely the ends of mountain-chains, themselves utterly wild and tractless. A narrow strip of sand was the sole link between Etchiu on the one hand and Echigo on the other.

The twilight lingered, and the road threaded its tortuous course for miles through the rice plain, bordered on either hand by the dykes of the paddyfields. Every few hundred feet, we passed a farmhouse screened by clipped hedgerows and bosomed in trees; and at longer intervals we rolled through some village, the country pike becoming for the time the village street. The land was an archipelago of homestead in a sea of rice.

The morning that was to give me my self-promised land crept on tiptoe into the room on the third story, and touched me where I slept, and on pushing the shoji apart and looking out, I beheld as fair a day as heart could wish. A faint misty vapor, like a bridal veil, was just lifting from off the face of things, and letting the sky show through in blue-eyed depths. It was a morning of desire, bashful for its youth as yet, but graced with a depth of atmosphere sure to expand into a full, warm, perfect noon; and I hastened to be out and become a part of it.

They had told us overnight that a small steamer plied every other day through Noto's unfamed inland sea, leaving the capital early in the morning, and touching shortly after at Wakura. As good luck would have it, the morrow happened not to be any other day, so we embraced the opportunity to embark in her ourselves. On her, it would be more accurate to say, for she proved such a mite that her cabin was barely possible and anything but desirable. By squatting down and craning my neck I peered in at the entrance, a feat which was difficult enough.

A Lady's Toilet - Hair-dressing - Paint and Cosmetics - Afternoon Visitors - Christian Converts.

KUROISHI, August 5.

The Sea-shore - A "Hairy Aino" - A Horse Fight - The Horses of Yezo - "Bad Mountains" - A Slight Accident - Magnificent Scenery - A Bleached Halting-Place - A Musty Room - Aino "Good-breeding."

Kwan-non Temple - Uniformity of Temple Architecture - A Kuruma Expedition - A Perpetual Festival - The Ni-o - The Limbo of Vanity - Heathen Prayers - Binzuru - A Group of Devils - Archery Galleries - New Japan - An Elegante.

H.B.M.'s LEGATION, YEDO, June 9.

The Canal-side at Niigata - Awful Loneliness - Courtesy - Dr. Palm's Tandem - A Noisy Matsuri - A Jolting Journey - The Mountain Villages - Winter Dismalness - An Out-of-the-world Hamlet - Crowded Dwellings - Riding a Cow - "Drunk and Disorderly" - An Enforced Rest - Local Discouragements - Heavy Loads - Absence of Beggary - Slow Travelling.

ICHINONO, July 12.