yesterday was Saturday. Take our advice, and do not venture into east longitude any more."

Long as the Pacific voyage is, we did not tire of it. The days were amply filled with exercise, reading, writing, and conversation, while at night the beautiful heavens tempted us to lounge for hours on deck, watching the glowing stars or the luminous ribbon of the Milky Way. The storm excepted, our daily passage through the calm azure water was so monotonous that we could not realize our approach to Asia. We seemed to be sailing over an interminable ocean, seeking no other haven than the setting sun, straight for whose disc our bows pointed night after night. At length, however, I was roused, early on the morning of the 12th of October, by my companion jumping suddenly from the upper bunk and exclaiming, "Japan is in sight!" and a moment afterwards our faces were framed, one in each of the open port-holes of our cabin. The view which met our eyes was at the same time strange and familiar. Conical hills, covered to their summits with dense foliage, descended abruptly to a plain which, wider here and narrower there, bordered the ocean. Every inch of the level land was cultivated, not in wide fields of grass or grain, but in parti-coloured slips and patches. Villages of tiny brown houses, with thatched roofs and wide eaves, planted along the ridges with lilies, clustered thickly on the plain, while detached dwellings, recalling the pagodas on a willow plate, peeped here and there from the foliage

covering the hill-sides. The sea was alive with the sampans" of fishermen, quaint boats of unpainted wood, with high bows and square sterns, sculled by living bronzes, standing erect in scanty drapery, their shaven heads tied around with blue and white handkerchiefs. It was like a picture by Meissonier, of a quaint and beautiful toy-land, utterly new to all European experience.

CHAPTER II.

YOKOHAMA—FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

October 12-13.

THE early Japanese, who looked eastward over an ocean which even to their boldest seamen appeared shoreless, might well believe that their country was truly the "Land of the Rising Sun." They called it Ni-Hon, or the Sun-source, a word which we usually spell Niphon, but, following a national custom which still prevails, they wrote it in Chinese characters, pronounced Ya-pan. The Portuguese who, first of Europeans, visited Niphon in the sixteenth century, were already settled at Macao and, being acquainted with the Chinese language, naturally gave the Chinese pronunciation to these characters which they found on the native maps, so that Ni-Hon, the Land of the Rising Sun, has been Japan for Europe ever since.

The engines of the City of Tokio stopped for the first time since leaving San Francisco, at half-past ten on the morning of the 12th of October, after being incessantly in motion for twenty-two days and nights. The steamer

was no sooner anchored than she was surrounded by "sampans," the strange boats already described, each propelled by two men who stood erect and back to back "sculling" with long crank-handled oars. The figures in the boats were stranger than the craft. It was raining heavily on our arrival, and the men appeared to be literally thatched with conical straw hats as big as an umbrella, while their bodies were wrapped in mantles of thatch which made them look like so many yellow porcupines.

Yokohama is purely a settlement town. It had no existence prior to 1859, when the site was placed at the service of Europeans by the Japanese Government, in partial fulfilment of their obligations under the AngloFrench Treaty of 1858. The Japanese had indeed agreed to open Kanagawa, the port of the capital, but their fear of strangers was stronger than their sense of duty, and, at the risk of seriously offending the foreign envoys, they changed the promised site for the settlement to Yokohama, then a poor fishing village, standing in the midst of a salt-water marsh, two miles from Kanagawa, and quite out of the line of traffic between that port and the capital. The object was to locate the foreigners where their trade could be controlled and themselves watched, or, if need be, shut up, as the Dutch had been in the small island settlement which they alone of all other nations had been permitted to occupy for two hundred years at Nagasaki. The

VOL. II.

envoys protested vigorously against this breach of faith, but, while they negotiated, the merchants established themselves in such numbers at Yokohama, that the question was taken out of the hands of the diplomatists, and the site accepted in spite of its drawbacks.

The irregular Yokohama of the first settlers was entirely destroyed by fire in 1866, and has been succeeded by a comparatively regular city, containing at the present time twelve hundred foreigners and a hundred and twenty thousand natives. Viewed from the roadstead, the town occupies a shelf of low and level land bordering the sea, and behind it rise hills of no great height, whose steep slopes are diversified here and there by cliffs, horizontally stratified, and of recent age. The hills are covered from base to summit with a dense growth of small conifers, above which in the west rises the sacred mountain Fusiyama, a white and symmetrical cone, shining with subdued lustre through some seventy miles of pearly air. On a nearer approach, the shore is seen to be lined with a row of good houses, each with a small garden in front, and bordered by a wide road protected by a substantial sea-wall. This is the "Bund," containing some of the best residences, and several large hotels. To the right are the low brown roofs of the native town, while to the left of the settlement, and separated from it by a small stream, are the "Bluffs," picturesque and densely wooded cliffs, once the site of the foreign legations only, but now