Etext of In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World
by Elizabeth Bisland 

FIRST STAGE

If, on the 13th of November, 1889, some amateur prophet had
foretold that I should spend Christmas Day of that year in the
Indian Ocean, I hope I should not by any open and insulting
incredulity have added new burdens to the trials of a hard-working
soothsayer--I hope I should, with the gentleness due a severe case
of aberrated predictiveness, have merely called his attention to that
passage in the Koran in which it is written, "The Lord loveth a
cheerful liar"--and bid him go in peace. Yet I did spend the 25th
day of December steaming through the waters that wash the shores
of the Indian Empire, and did do other things equally preposterous,
of which I would not have believed myself capable if forewarned
of them. I can only claim in excuse that these vagaries were
unpremeditated, for the prophets neglected their opportunity and I
received no augury.

On the 14th of November of the aforementioned year, I was
awakened at eight o'clock as usual by the maid with the breakfast
tray--which also contained the morning papers and a neat pile of
notes and letters. Among these latter were acceptances of
invitations I had sent to half a dozen agreeable folk to come and
drink five-o'clock tea with me on the 15th, the usual
communications from one's friends on casual subjects; an
invitation to dinner; a bill; and a notice from my tailor that I might
some time during the day have the final fitting of a gown in
process of construction. All as pleasantly commonplace as the
most mild-mannered individual could expect or desire.

I read the papers leisurely, made a calm and uneventful toilet, and
the very first intimation I received of the coming thunderbolt out
of the serene sky of my existence was a hurried and mysterious
request, at half-past ten o'clock, that I would come as soon as
possible to the office of the magazine of which I was one of the
editors. My appetite for mystery at that hour of the day is always
lamentably feeble, and it was nearly eleven before I found time to
go and investigate this one, although the office in question was
only a few minutes' walk from my residence. On arriving, the
editor and owner of the magazine asked if I would leave New York
that evening for San Francisco and continue from there around the
world, endeavoring to complete the journey in some absurdly
inadequate space of time.

If my appetite for mystery at that hour is not strong, my appetite at
eleven in the morning for even the most excruciatingly funny jokes
may be said to actually not exist, and this one, I remember, bored
me more than most. But in the course of half an hour I had become
convinced that the editor really wished me to make the attempt,
and I had earnestly endeavored to convince him that I meant to do
nothing of the sort. To begin with, I didn't wish to. In the second
place, guests were coming to my house to tea on the following day;
thirdly, I was not prepared in the matter of appropriate garments
for such an abrupt departure, and lastly, but most weightily, I
foresaw the notoriety that an effort to outdo the feat of Jules
Verne's hero was likely to bring upon me, and to this notoriety I
most earnestly objected. Though for some years I had been more
or less connected with journalism, I had appeared in the papers
only as the contributor of unsigned articles, and the amount of
distress I experienced when I first saw my name in a head line was
so far beyond even my anticipations that I then and there registered
a vow--Throughout this voyage I had cause to owe much gratitude
to journalists for all manner of aid and civility, but I resolved in
the future to so endeavor to conduct myself that they would never
have reason to put my name in a head line again.

The editor and I having passed the better part of an hour going
over this matter, substantial arguments were finally advanced by
him which persuaded me to make the experiment of lowering the
circumnavigatory record. I then took a cab and drove to my tailor
for the appointed fitting and for a vigorous interview in which he
was ultimately convinced that I could wear that gown at six o'clock
in the evening.

The next few hours were busy ones.

To the masculine mind there appears to be something strangely
exhilarating in the thought of a woman being abruptly torn from
her home without sufficient time to put her wardrobe in order, and
to all the men responsible for this voyage the most delightful
feature apparently of the whole affair was the fact that I should be
forced to get ready in five hours for a seventy-five days' voyage
around the world.--Why this should be so a woman cannot easily
divine. It fails utterly to appeal to her sense of humor. It is one of
those hopeless warps in the male mind that my sex no longer
attempt to comprehend or to straighten, and, finding it incurable,
have learned to bear with and ignore it as far as possible.

I finally managed to get all absolute necessaries of travel into a
good-sized steamer trunk, a large Gladstone bag and a shawl-strap,
but found, by experience, that my progress would have been in no
degree retarded, and my comfort and happiness far better served,
by carrying a second and larger box with everything I could
possibly have required. I managed the trip on two cloth gowns,
half a dozen light bodices, and an evening silk, but might quite as
well have carried my entire winter and a large part of my summer
wardrobe. Happily I took the precaution of carrying plenty of pins
and hair-pins. I had had some previous experience with their
vicious ways, and well knew that in critical moments in foreign
parts they would get up playful little games of hide-and-seek that
would tend to undermine my temper, and the only sure preventive
was to have geologic layers of them all through the trunk, so that a
shaft might be hastily sunk through one's belongings at any
moment with a serene certainty of striking rich deposits of both
necessities of female existence.

. . . To wake up in the morning to one's usual daily round and find
one's self at night voyaging round the world is an experience
calculated to surprise even a mind as composed as that of Pet
Marjorie's historically placid fowl; and looking back now over the
time of my departure I find that, though to outward seeming I also
was ". . . most exceeding ca'm," in reality I was practically stupefied with astonishment for at least two days.

I remember thinking rapidly on all manner of subjects; telling
myself warningly that it would not do to forget anything or make
any mistakes, as they could not be rectified. . . . I remember
thinking that my new gown fitted very well, and that, though my
face was drawn and white with the excitement and fatigues of the
day, my new glazed hat was distinctly becoming. . . . Then there
were cabs and hurry--kisses-- last directions--the bumping of the
box on the stair--a big bunch of pink roses (which I felt was a nice
complimentary touch to my travelling ensemble)--everybody
talking at once and giving different advice and directions--the
glare of lights--the coffin-like smell of a sleeping-car--and I was
off for seventy-five days' travel round the globe.

. . . Then no more distinct impressions until Chicago suddenly
steps across my twenty-five-thousand-mile path and it is necessary
to change cars.

. . . Even this is vague. I remember that through some mistake
there was no one there to meet me as had been arranged--that I
wandered about a vast, gloomy, and rather empty station in the
care of a friendly conductor--that I sat on a high stool at a counter
and quenched internal cravings, caused by lack of dinner, with tea
and ham; every mouthful regarded with wan interest by the person
who officiated in the echoing lunch hall--that the conductor having
bidden me a commiserating adieu, I slid away into the night, very
homesick, very cross, and haunted by the bitterest suspicions of the
happy results of a tea-and-ham dinner.

But with that night's sleep I slept away my stupefaction of
amazement, and awoke at daybreak in my right mind, and, pulling
up my window curtain, found the sun almost ready to rise.

I have never permitted a vulgar familiarity to dull my keen delight
in the every-varying pageant of the breaking of day; so that,
consequently, on the rare occasions when I assist at this function,
my pleasure has all the enthusiasm of novelty.

Now the lifted curtain showed me a New Jerusalem. . . . As if to
one who should rise to pray at the moment when God gave his
great daily fiat of "Let there be light," there should be vouchsafed a
white, luminous foreshadowing of that which it hath not entered
into the heart of man to understand. . . . Not the strangely narrow
and urban vision of Patmos; no streets or walls, but a limitless
Land of Pearl!

. . . Soft undulations, full and tender as the bosom of a sleeping
mother, rose and fell far beyond the eye's reach, and melted into
the sky. No tree or thicket broke the suave outlines, but where the
thin silver veins of the streams slipped through the curves of the
plain, slim, leafless willows hung, like glistening fringes. . . . In the
night a hoar frost had fallen that was to snow as sleep is to death;
and the pale reaped fields, the sere meadows, and silent uplands
were transfigured by the first gleam of day to a mystery and glory
of silver and pearl. As the light grew, nacreous tints of milky blue
and rose flushed the argent pallor of the land, and when the yellow
disk rolled up over the horizon's edge I travelled for some brief
space in a world of intolerable splendor, where innumerable
billions of frost crystals flashed back to the sun the reflection of
his shining face. Even the engine-driver was moved, I fancy, by
this marvelous morning vision, for though we were far from any
stopping-place, there suddenly thrilled through the silence a long,
keen, triumphant blast, and we trailed as we flew floating golden
plumes of steam. . . .
 
As I passed in my swift circle about the great ball plunging along
its planetary paths, many mighty and glorious visions of the
coming and passing of light were revealed to me; but none more
fair than this with that radiance of youth, whose vast, sweet
nature-shadow and simulacrum the dawning is. . . . Eternally
renewed, through all ages. . . still, with the white peace of
innocence . . . joyous in unwasted strength and untried powers . . .

rosy with promise and potentialities, gilding all the
commonplaceness of the landscape with golden glamours and
fantasies . . . an Eden created out of the hollow void of night, in
which to rest for one dewy, enchanted moment of purity and love
before the sun with his flaming sword drives us forth to the toil
and heat of the day!

. . . In developing my mental Kodak roll after returning, I found
that during this period of the journey most of the views are
landscapes, seeing that I was afflicted with peculiarly uninteresting
fellow-travelers who made poor subjects for snap shots. Across the
aisle from me was a pair of ancient little lovers who numbered
some hundred or more years between them, I fancy. They had
nested long since; all their fledglings were flown, and, left alone
together once more, they were on their way to Los Angeles to
spend a second honeymoon among the winter orange blossoms: a
pretty pale afterglow of love. But though their quaint, antiquated
billing and cooing was a pleasing enough thing to watch, it is
notorious that even in these second bridal journeys the outsider is
very much outside, and I was driven back perforce to my window.

. . . "A perfect day," the record says. . . . More undulant fields
clothed in the yellow stubble of the gathered harvest. Here and
there black loam broken for winter sowing--a square of jet set in
the pale amber--and over all a faint, turquoise sky. . . . 
That night we were in Council Bluffs, Omaha, and by chance got
passage on the new fast mail-train, which had been put on as an
experiment in time across the continent, and was carrying but one
sleeper and the General Manager's private car.

The pace was tremendous from the start. . . . We began to climb
the Great Divide. Trees and shrubs grew rare and more rare, and
finally vanished altogether.

. . . Great gray plains lay all about us, covered thinly with a
withered, ashen-colored plant; the bitter results of an unequal
struggle for existence, and strangely resembling in miniature the
gnarled, writhen cedars that cling to wind-scourged coasts.

Settlements were few and far between. Scrawny horses picked up a
scant living in the desolate upland meadows; and an occasional
yellow cur that came out and barked at us as we went by was the
only other form of animal life to be seen. From time to time we
passed a dwelling, a square cabin of gray unpainted boards, always
tightly closed and the dwellers always absent somewhere on
business. The only distinct proof I ever saw of the human
habitance of these silent, lonely homes was a tiny pair of butternut
trousers fluttering on the clothes-line. The minute American
citizen who should have occupied these trousers was invisible, and
I greatly fear they were perhaps his only pair.

. . . We climbed and climbed; always at tremendous speed, and
always the land growing more desolate, and wildly drear, like the
cursed site of some prehistoric Sodom, sown with salt. The air
shone with a luminous clearness undreamable in coast countries,
and at night the stars were huge and fierce: not the soft-gleaming
palpitant planets of tropic nights, but keen and scintillant as
swords. . . . There was something hideous and brutal in the doom
laid upon this unhappy territory, as of a Prometheus chained on the
mountain-tops; its blood dried to dust in its veins, and lifting a
scarred face of gray despair to the rainless sky.

From time to time we crossed a feeble, trickling stream; but no
verdure marked the course of its waters, bitter and fruitless as
tears. During the night our way lay through that still more desolate
portion of this dry region named, with simple and expressive
literalness, the Bad Lands; and here again I saw a most wonderful
coming of the light. The moon, wan with the dawn, hung directly
in the zenith, and on the eastern rim of the ghostly gray plain,
under the quivering jewel of the morning star, burned the first
vague flush of day. Slowly a dusky amethyst radiance filled the
sapphire bowl of the sky, quenching the stars one by one as it rose,
and when the sun showed over the world's edge the cup was
brimmed, and the pale moon shone faintly in its depths, like the
drowned pearl of the Egyptian queen. There was no eye but mine
to see, yet in the midst of unpeopled desolation the majestic
ceremonies of the sky were fulfilled with the same slow pomp and
splendor as if all the worshippers of the Sun knelt in awed wonder
to see the Bridegroom come forth of his chamber.

. . . Our speed through this part of the country was terrible. Five
hours away from Ogden we were two hours and a half behind the
time set for our arrival there. Some three quarters of a million
hung upon our arriving promptly and getting the track clear for
ourselves beyond, not to mention many other important
considerations that could scarcely be reckoned in figures; for a
great government contract for mails would be either lost or won by
morning. A certain engineer, whose name was Foley--or words to
that effect-- was telegraphed to meet us at the next stop. He was a
gentleman of Irish extraction who labored under an entire absence
of physical timidity, and who remarked with jovial determination,
as he climbed into the cab, that he would "get us to Ogden--or hell,
on time." Several times during that five hours' ride the betting
stood ten to one on the latter goal, and Hades was hot favorite. The
grade at this part of the road has a descent of 93 feet in a mile, and
the track corkscrewed through gorges and canons with but small
margin between us and destruction. To these considerations Mr.

Foley was cheerfully indifferent, and pulling out the throttle he let
the engine have her head at the rate of sixty-five miles an hour.

The train rocked like a ship at sea, and sleepers held to their berths
in terror, the more nervous actually succumbing to mal de mer.

The plunge of the engine, that now and again whimpered
affrightedly in the darkness, could be felt through the whole train,
as one feels beneath one the fierce play of the loins of a runaway
horse. From the rear car the tracks were two lines of fire in the
night. The telegraph pole reeled backwards form our course and
the land fled from under us with horrible nightmare weirdness.

The officers of the train became alarmed and ordered speed
slackened; but Mr. Foley, consulting his watch, regretted with
great firmness that he could not oblige them. One man rolled in an
anguish of terror on the floor; and the General Manager, engaged
in a late game of whist, regarding the sufferer with sympathetic
interest as he took the odd trick with the thirteenth trump,
remarked that it was such episodes as this in American life that
made us a nation of youthful gray-heads.

We arrived in Ogden on time.

Mr. Foley dismounted with alacrity from his cab, remarked that
these night rides were prone to give a man cold, and went in
pursuit of an antidote behind a swinging Venetian door on the
corner, and we saw him no more.

From here the vast, desolate uplands, 8000 feet high in the keen
dry air, showed no further sign of human habitation between the
stations, and were ornamented only with the frequent jack rabbit,
the occasional coyote, and now and then an arrangement of tepees.

Indians crowded about the train at every stop; those of the female
sex who were blessed with offspring permitting us to view the
living contents of the corded parcels they carried on their backs in
exchange for small current coin. The pappoose, I discovered, is the
original Baby Bunting. He slumbers with stoical composure in a
nest of rabbit skins--presumably those for which "papa went
a-hunting"--that line a portable wooden cradle into which he is
strapped, and from which, I am told, he rarely emerges during
infancy. The girls and boys from six to sixteen I found very pretty,
with smooth red skins, glittering teeth and eyes, and black
Vandyked locks. Those whom years had overtaken were
indescribably wrinkled and parched. Old squaws squatted in the
dust huddled in blankets, and were as impassive as ancient
worm-eaten idols. A coin dropped into their hands brought a
mumble and a glance from their rusted eyes; but indifference did
not wound them, neither did the fast train of any of its passengers
excite their curiosity--the vagaries of the white man were so
numerous that nervous prostration would be a sure consequence of
any attempt to interest themselves in his doings, and peace and
composure lay only in entirely ignoring him.

All through this country the air had a delicious dry perfume, like
the smell of parching vegetation, that was stimulating and
wholesome as the resinous incense of pines.

The night before reaching San Francisco we found our first trees
again, at a little wayside eating station, where a long row of
poplars stood up stiffly in the dusk near our path, and a tiny
fountain plashed with an enchanting, cool melodiousness. . . . The
air was soft and spring-like and the moist darkness pleasant with a
smell as of white clover. It could not, of course, in November,
have been really the sweet early flowers of the grass, yet I know
nothing else that gives out the same clean, delicate perfume; nor
can I guess from what that pure vernal fragrance did arise, that was
like the first breath from a promised land after long wandering in a
country of wilderness and drought.

Sacramento stopped us for a moment at daylight, and here we
found rich, juicy verdure, watery marshes, and the first outer edges
of that yellow wave from China which has broken upon the Pacific
coasts. Still there were no trees. Only grassy, rounded hills, with
white sea-mists trailing among them. A country much like that
about Newport, but without that icy breath always in the air of the
upper Atlantic coast. There was a certain genial tenderness in this
atmosphere that even in the hottest day of August the eastern coast
never knows.

. . . At fifteen minutes past nine the nose of the ferry-boat from
Oakland touches the San Francisco wharf. We have crossed the
continent in four days and twenty hours--thanks to Mr. Foley--and
the distance between New York and the Western metropolis is
reduced by a whole day. A great achievement! There are crowds of
reporters waiting to interview everybody; General Manager,
engineer, conductor--even me. We splash cheerfully through the
warm rain and oozing mud--the wet season began two days
ago--with pleased faces that our tremendous journey is over,
walking with long strides and swinging arms because of the long,
cramping confinement.

To my eyes, accustomed to the soaring loftiness of New York
architecture, this city seems astonishly low. Three or four stories at
the most the average is. Because of earthquake they say; but
latterly these have almost entirely ceased to occur, as if the land
had grown to realize that civilization would not tolerate such
impulsive ways, and had gradually abandoned them
shame-facedly, as being in extremely bad taste. Consequently a
few of the more recent building have begun to climb, Babel-like,
into the dripping skies.

One gets a remarkable impression of newness here such as a
Londoner might on his first landing in New York. Every one tells
you, "I have been here a year--six months--three months--three
years." One begins to believe that no one was ever born here. All
the buildings look new and fresh, and the whole atmosphere of the
place is charged with a vigorous, disrespectful sort of youth.

The city, or at least the Spanish part of it, was founded in the year
of the Declaration of Independence, but the American town is only
forty or fifty years old. The hotel at which I stop was erected in
1875. It is a huge caravansary, built around a square and enclosing
a vast asphalted court adorned with palms and ferns. There is an
arcade within this court where the typical American hotel
frequenter tips back his chair, reads the papers, and smokes. On
the outer side of the arcade are shops of every description, so that
one may purchase all the ordinary needs of life without leaving
one's lodging-place.

I find here that my progress must be arrested for two days, as the
arrangements for hurrying the departure of the ship have fallen
through; and I do not altogether grieve, for this tremendous pace
for thousands of miles across the country has told upon my nerves
to an absurd degree, and I wonder, as I shiver with exhaustion and
tremble with nameless, undefined apprehensions, how the coming
generation that is to travel a hundred and fifty miles an hour will
bear the strain of it. Some process of adaption to a
nerve-destroying environment will take place doubtless, humanity
being so elastic in such matters.

Meantime there is some space to investigate this first one of the
many great cities I must pass through. The editors of the San
Francisco "Examiner," who have shown me every courtesy from
the moment of my arrival, invite me to luncheon at the Cliff
House, which stands on the very western edge of the continent,
upon one of the pillars of the Golden Gate.

There is still a soft, warm rain falling when we start. Roses climb
around the porches of the residences and hang heavy-drenched
blossoms amid their shining wet leaves, perfuming the damp city
streets with delicious garden odors. Should I shut my eyes to the
hills I mount and descend, the warmth, the humidity, and the rose
odors would make me believe myself in New Orleans again. . . . In
that far distant city I might be going on just such an expedition as
this to Spanish Fort on the Lakeside. It gives me a sense of
nostalgia, not for the people and city I have but just left, but for an
earlier home, where I would have found just such carelessly happy
geniality as among these witty, good-looking men who regard the
delays of a train with amiable indifference, and see their day slip
from them with the carelessness of a spendthrift.

The train crawls along the edge of the harbor shut in between the
grassy, treeless hills. We wind around their flanks in perilous
fashion for some space, for the harbor juts deeply into the land,
and as we cling to their steep sides we hear the waves dashing
beneath. There is a sudden turn at last, and before us lies spread
the Western Ocean! . . . There is a joyous shock of astonishment in
the sight. . . . A sense of discovery, of splendid vastness, of a rich
new experience seized and dominated. For one keen instant not he
who stood  "Silent upon a peak in Darien" felt a more magnificent dilation of spirit than I.

We lunch, jovially and sumptuously, upon the sea's edge. Already
the day is declining as we finish. The rain has ceased, and in the
west the curtain of cloud lifts. On a balcony that overhangs the
water we watch the sunset. Three great crags stand up sharply two
hundred yards away--Seal Rocks--covered with grumbling, barking
sea lions, the city's pets, whom the law protects. They look much
like fat pigs from this distance. At the last moment the sun flames
out gloriously; reddens all the heavens, and gilds a rippling road
for me across the waterly world I must traverse. It is a sign of
promise, they tell me.

The ride home in the cable car is a curious experience. The streets
are of the most astonishing steepness still, though millions have
been spend in grading the hills. On each of the cars is a small open
space in front where one may sit if one likes and enjoy the
sensation of plunging down the most startling inclines and yet see
the car stop short at perilous points to allow a traveller to leisurely
dismount. The road leads past the famous Nob Hill, where the
bonanza kings have their residences--huge wooden palaces of the
most rococo designs. It is said that these half-dozen residences cost
$9,000,000 to build. James C. Flood's house is of brown stone, the
only dwelling of that material in the state, all of the stone having
been imported from the East at prodigious expense. One of these
palaces--the property of a bonanza relict--is of a curious lead color,
which, with its overwhelmingly ornate decorations, gives it an odd
resemblance to a gigantic hot-air stove.

There were beautiful public gardens, great public buildings, and
many relics of the ancient Spanish domination to be seen in this
charming city, but my flight was too rapid to pause for these. That
night I saw the quarter known locally as China Town, peeped into
some of the huge, splendid theatres and restaurants, and then, at
three o'clock the next day, set sail for Japan.

SECOND STAGE 

Amid my dreams has always been a carefully elaborated and favorite one of the day upon which I should at last set out on my travels. I had thought all the details of this episode, and what my emotions should be--a tasteful mingling of regret and exultation--as I bade my unfortunate home-staying friends adieu, and the great Cunarder swung free from the docks, bearing me away to the delights and mysteries of foreign lands. Even in my childhood my sympathy for the heroes in the fairy tales was always keenest at the moment when they waved their hands in farewell and turned their faces at last towards the magical adventures that stalked about impatiently awaiting their advent in the strange countries where their havens lay. So it was a matter of active regret to me that by leaving America from the other side of the continent, this long-dreamed-of incident on the Cunard pier was forever robbed of the salt of novelty.

The White Star steamship Oceanic, of the Occidental and Oriental line--Charles H. Dempson commander--sailed from San Francisco at three o'clock Thursday afternoon of November the 21st, and I found it even under these circumstances a very exciting thing to leave one's country for the first time.

It was much as I had imagined the other picture: the cabin full of ornate flower pieces; luggage thumping down the companion-way; people running back and forth with the apparent purposelessness of ants in a hill; and the friends of the departing standing about in that helpless discomfort and uselessness that make even those whose hearts are torn by the separation long to be gone and put them out of their awkward misery.

Many of the pleasant acquaintances I had made in this short visit to San Francisco had come to bid me God speed, accompanied by a delegation who had got wind of my eccentric performance and came with no other credentials than a desire to gape. This was a figure not in my original picture. The whole army of martyrs to curiosity had afflicted me sorely in those two days on the Pacific coast, sending up their cards in the hotel with urgent messages, and on admission confessing with placid impudence that their sole excuse for this intrusion was a desire to look at me--presumably as a sort of inexpensive freak show. Experience demonstrated, however, the high and delightful effectiveness of an elaborate and astonished civility, that never failed to reduce their robust self-confidence to limp and writhing embarrassment in exactly three minutes, after which discovery I put the heathen to the edge of that manner and smote them hip and thigh. 

. . . It must be admitted that my emotions on the occasion of this departure were much less tastefully mingled than I had planned they should be, low spirits and loneliness being such active ingredients that they disguised all other flavors, and it is to a little incident I shall forever remember with pleasure that I did not leave America quite unmixedly miserable. At the moment when the gong had warned all visitors ashore there was handed up to me from the wharf a great nosegay of white chrysanthemums and roses, to which was attached a card inscribed "J. M. Prather," and bearing "good wishes" and "New Orleans" pencilled in the corner. A hat was lifted from a handsome gray head, and two kind dark Southern eyes gave me a smile of such friendliness and good-will that it warmed my heart like a greeting from my own people. This unknown gentleman taking the trouble to bid me a silent, fragrant farewell seems to me the most delicate and charming impulse of that much-misinterpreted and scoffed-at Southern chivalry, and should he ever see this I wish him to know how pleasant and lasting was the perfume of his flowers and kindly thought.

Perhaps this is the proper moment to speak of a feature that was to me one of the most interesting of this unusual voyage. I was a young woman, quite alone, and doing a somewhat conspicuous and eccentric thing, yet throughout the entire journey I never met with other than the most exquisite and unfailing courtesy and consideration; and if I had been a princess with a suite of half a hundred people I could have felt no safer or happier. It seems to me this speaks very highly for the civilization existing in all travelled parts of the globe, when a woman's strongest protection is the fact that she is unprotected. I owe a gratitude beyond all adequate expression for the good-will shown me everywhere. It would require many pages to catalogue the names of those who gave up their comfort to insure mine, who considered no trouble of consequence if it secured me from annoyance and disappointment, and who spared no exertion to make my journey speedy and comfortable. In every port I touched I found the kindest of welcomes, and I believe I have put a girdle round the earth of warm and generous friends whom I shall always remember with affection and gratitude. The staff of the San Francisco "Examiner," T. D. McKay, the Burlington Passenger Agent, the owners and officers of the Oceanic, Lieutenant Mitchell McDonald, the Norddeutscher Lloyd people, and my fellow-passengers everywhere are among those who assisted me by every means in their power to effect my object and make my journey agreeable.

. . . The last wooden link with the shore is withdrawn. There is a fluttering storm of handkerchiefs--a brief space of water in the beautiful bay--and then we pass away to the west through the Gates of Gold.

. . . America sinks out of sight, slowly-a vision of green hills in level sunshine. We are divided from it now by a long ridge of whirling foam--the bar, where we begin to rise and fall with the first pulse of the sea. Even that vanishes at last and we plunge forward lonelily on the heaving, dusky plain. The wind of the coming night is cold, and the fluttering paper prayers the Chinese passengers cast overboard to insure a safe voyage it catches and whips sharply away, like autumn leaves falling in the November night.

Not yet have the four hundred pigtails in the steerage composed themselves for the voyage. They run to and fro with queer-colored parcels of strange shapes and keep up a ceaseless, shrill, guinea-fowl chatter, very cheerful in tone. Most of them are going home to settle down upon money made from the "foreign devils," and whatever happens they can laugh.

Even up on the hurricane deck the chill sea wind is tainted with that clinging, pervasive odor that one comes to recognize as "the Chinese smell." No cleanliness can combat it. The ship from stem to stern is wonderfully clean, yet never in the whole voyage is one quite free from the sense of it. Pierre Loti declares it can be smelled on the Chinese coast, while the ship is still miles at sea. On analyzation it appears to be compounded of the bitter fumes of opium and the smoke of incense sticks. An object once permeated by the odor is never rid of it again, and all China reeks of these strange stifling fumes.

I smelled it first in the Chinese Quarter of San Francisco--a place that left a sinister, menacing impression upon my mind. A sense of this being the first gnawing yellow of an overwhelming flood--forced forward by the irresistible propulsion of an over-population behind. One more of those huge, blind migrations of hunger which, like a tidal wave, have obliterated flourishing peoples and races in the full flush of power and civilization, nations who have vanished as herbage vanishes before the gigantic, myriad voracity of desert locusts. Conquered by the mere dead weight of numbers that fill up interposing gulfs with countless dead, bridging all moats between food and that pitiless, relentless famine.

China has 500,000,000 of population, each unit trained by generations of bitter struggle for survival to an industry and economy almost superhuman. California has already nearly 100,000 of them; 30,000 living in San Francisco. Every westward-going steamer carries from three to four hundred home, men who have in a short time secured a competence, and are returning to enjoy it; and yet their number in America apparently suffers no diminution. Fenced out by law from California, the wave flows around this obstacle into British Columbia and trickles back, drop by drop, into the United States. We do not assimilate them as we do our other immigration. They hold to their own national dress, manners, and food. That part of San Francisco abandoned to them grows daily like a Chinese city. They gut standing houses and reconstruct the interiors to suit their needs. Outside, lanterns hang in front of doors that have Chinese signs, and above these, frail balconies are strung about the windows where jars of chrysanthemums droop their ragged blossoms over the sill. The air is thick with Oriental odors. Street stalls expose for sale vegetables and fruits unknown to us, and the tiny shops with their Chinese furnishings and inscriptions sell wares which no American seeks.

. . . At eleven at night this transplanted city of Cathay is still all alive; the streets crowded with a moving stream of black blouses and yellow faces--everyone cheerful, chattering, and wide awake. The shops stand open, and workmen continue their labors as if it were still high noon. In a basement, a few steps down from the street, gold workers toil in a little black room, seven by ten; a wheezy gas jet flares above their heads, and directly in front of each, on the work bench at which they sit, is a small bowl of cocoanut oil in which smoulder faintly a handful of thin white racines. The flame from these, with a blowpipe, softens and fuses the metals in which they work. Though the place is so narrow and squalid, the bracelets and clasps in process of manufacture--ornamented with ingeniously varied chisel marks--are of considerable value. The workers are impassively indifferent to our curiosity. They work without raising their eyes as we handle their goods, and do not even glance up as we leave, toiling on unhurriedly, though the night is half spent. Here, as everywhere, tiny corkscrews of pungent smoke curl up from a bunch of smouldering Joss sticks stuck in a little earthenware bowl of sand.

. . . Plunging through a narrow door, we grope along a low, tortuous passage, descend to the cellar by rickety, greasy stairs, thread more back corridors, where, in little branching rooms, somnolent bundles lie motionless on shelves--sodden with poppy fumes, past greasy, hot kitchens and cackling cooks, with hissing midnight meals in preparation--and emerge at last into a crowded apartment where men with hideous masks and flaming dresses--like mediaeval devils in a mystery play--stand idly about waiting for a cue, and others, radiant and befeathered as tropical birds, pass to the stage by the two doors.

. . . A hideous din of banging, scraping, and clashing of brass. Above all a shrill monotonous chant in a penetrating falsetto. It is the green-room and wings of the Dom Quai Yuen--The Elegant Flower-House--where the gems of the classic drama of China are enacted, and where the actors lodge, eat, and smoke their opium.

The performance began at four in the afternoon, and has gone on without intermission ever since. It will end at twelve.

Rapid changes of costume--stiff with gold needlework--are taking place. Faces are being painted--those of the fiends with Oriental ingenuity of hideousness--huge beards are assumed, and gorgeous head-dresses with flags and long pheasant feathers waving above them. We go through the left door and sit on the stage, as if it were the time of Queen Bess and this was one of Mr. William Shakespeare's new plays.

The play goes on, undisturbed by our presence, the actors carefully stepping to one side as they pass us.

The auditorium is packed tight as a sardine box with standing Chinamen who listen as long as they find it amusing and then go away. Up in the gallery two or three sheep-faced Chinese women lend a somewhat indifferent attention.

The heat is frightful. . . . There are no windows and but one door, and the smell is overpowering. Not a stench of unwashed bodies, as in a low-class Caucasian crowd, but this same strangling mixture of opium and incense. By contrast even the ill-smelling streets are delightful, and we escape.

The detective, who bears himself with amiable, scornful courage in this resort of "Highbinders," leads the way through fetid, crime-stained alleys. A loud warning note sounds from somewhere near us, and in an instant the street swarms with men passing composedly with their hands under their blouses. The detective turns into a low room with a double nail-studded door. A table covered with a strip of matting and two benches are the only furniture. The owner is calmly smoking a cigarette, apparently engaged in some remote and subtle ratiocinative process. Ten seconds ago, in this room and fifty others, the game of fan-tan was in furious progress. That one note emptied them all.

. . . We mount stairs to a dingy Joss-house, where more incense sticks burn before a trinity of calm-eyed idols--the God of the Sombre Heavens, the God of the Southern Seas, and the God of Happy Wealth--and stroll through the rooms of a restaurant beautiful with carvings and silk hangings, Rakamono and marble and ebony furniture.

. . . But the night wanes and our heads are giddy with this clinging, sickening odor. We will go back to the hotel.

It is the smell of the Chinese sailors and passengers that wakes the memories of the strange sights and sounds.

. . . The night is cold. Top-gallant sails are being set to catch the rising evening wind, and the cries of the pig-tailed yellow seamen are shrill and raucous, like the interjectional and acrimonious talk of cats on a back fence.

It is time to go below and prepare for the first night at sea.

For the next four days my only memory of the Pacific Ocean is of a foaming flood of emerald that roars past my port-hole, making a dull green twilight within. I see only this and the slats of the upper berth. There are six of these slats. Of this I am unwaveringly sure--though I am not usually accurate about figures--because I counted them several thousand times. It was the only mental process of which I was capable during the long nights while I lay and listened to the loud combat of the thundering squadrons outside, whose white plumes flashed into sight again with the first gray gleam of day--the battle still raging. Every plank in the ship creaked and groaned, and shrieked without once pausing to take breath, and I regarded with contemptuous indifference the frantic tobogganing of my most treasured possessions all over the stateroom. What were the fleeting things of this world to one to whose unexampled sufferings death must soon put a period? It was comforting to thing that one's last will and testament was made, but hateful the contemplation of burial at sea. It was such an unnecessary tragical end to this ridiculous wild-goose chase.

The fifth day the boiling pot of the sea subsided, and I began to take beef tea and resolution to live. Other women were also beginning to straggle back to life on deck-pale, wan, and with neglected bangs tied up in lace scarfs. They lay in steamer-chairs swathed in rugs, and were indifferent about their appearance and to the charms of conversation. The week was nearly done before the whole ship's company assembled at table, and we began to take note of our fellow-voyagers in this water caravansary.

It was a cosmopolitan crew--Norwegians, Russians, English, French, Japanese, Americans, Germans, Hungarians, and even one Manx-man--our chief-engineer, with a pleasant "out-country" flavor to his speech, and full of tales of a profoundly esoteric humor--a kindly, mellow nature, like William Black's old Highland lairds.

There is the Englishman who has made his fortune in China and retired, and is bringing a new-made wife out, by way of America, to see the East, where he had lived so long--an angular English girl, containing the potential British matron, who knits gray stockings and keeps herself carefully aloof from acquaintances that might be detrimental in the future.

The typical American girl is with us travelling alone--greyhound- waisted, tiny of foot, clad with tailor-made neatness, and armed with an amateur photographer's outfit. She is on her way to visit the American Minister to Japan.

And a couple from Georgia, who have lived twenty years in Los Angeles, but have lost nothing of their genial old-fashioned Georgia ways and looks, and still speak with a soft Southern drawl.

We have a full cargo of missionaries--fifteen in all--mostly young women, and, on this occasion, all Presbyterians. There is much missionary travel back and forth on this line, for the work of proselytization in China, and Japan goes briskly on. Among them is a young doctor, who has just taken her degree, and is going to the East to save both souls and bodies. She wears "reform" clothes, and has a strong, well-cut face, from which the heavy hair is brushed smoothly back. She regards the ten years' exile into which she is entering as merely the apprenticeship of her professional career, and is likely to consider the physical welfare of her patients of more importance than the acceptance of her creed. She is the plain, wholesome product of Northwestern life and a Northwestern female college--speaking the speech of that region with a broad and blurring R. . . . Her future is simple and pleasant to guess at.

One is less sure of the handsome, slim girl of twenty with deep-set gray eyes, and the delicate pointed fingers of what the palmists call "the psychic hand," indicating undue spiritual intensity of nature. In a spasm of the romantic exaltation to which young women of her age are subject, she has condemned herself to a decade of lonely exile in a remote Japanese town; but a pair of enchanting dimples in her fresh young cheeks war with the maiden severity of her earnest eyes, and she is not indifferent to a young girl's nature joys, though she mentions them loftily as things in the remote past appealing to her-now forever put away. It would be pretty and amusing, as a girl's exalt‚ fancies are sometimes, were note the sacrifice of her best young years to indifferent heathen no so real and so melancholy to thing on. One is tempted to pray that some Cymon may come to rescue this Christian Iphigenia from her squalid little Oriental altar before the knife of distaste and ennui shall have murdered her youth and charm.

. . . The sea is becoming very blue.

The emerald fades as we pass into these vast liquid fields, and the blue deepens and deepens until one finds no words to express, no simile to convey, the intensity of its burning azure. Sapphire would be pale and cold beside this sea--palpitating with wave shadows deep as violets, yet not purple, and with no touch of any color to mar its perfect hue. It flames with unspeakable, many-faceted splendor, under a sky that is wan by contrast with its profundity of tint, and the very foam that curls away from our wake is blue as the blue shadows in snow. The cutter-like prow of our ship flings up two delicate plumes of pearl, and the sunlight shining through these has wrought upon the blue floor beneath us a rainbow arch that encircles our onward path, moves with our moving, and shimmers upon the waving flood as the iris shimmers upon a peacock's breast. 

. . . It is here enormously deep. The longest plummet line ever let into the sea went down here, and only found bottom at the depth of 4000 fathoms. If one should choose this place to be cured of the wound of living he could never reach the firm earth beneath it all. He would hand forever in these soundless, icy depths, moving scarcely at all with the slow, obscure flux of the deep-sea tides, surrounded by strange, formless, protoplasmic life, blind, senseless, and inert--the germs from which through billions of years he himself had risen--working out here in these blue solitudes of silence the mysteries of generation and upward growth. He would never perish or be devoured or reabsorbed like his fellows, but age after age would lie enclosed as in a frozen blue gem, with burial more splendid and secure than the Pharaohs. . . . The voyage is a lonely one. In all these many thousand miles we never see a sail or any shore. There is no sea life about us, save of the sword-winged birds that follow us from San Francisco to Japan without sign of fatigue, wheeling easily after us as we plunge onward at the rate of three hundred and fifty miles a day, and having quite the appearance of loafing along and waiting for us to catch up. It fills one with a sort of despair to get up every morning and see the same sea, the same horizon, the same birds--nothing to mark our progress except the figures marked every day at noon on the map hanging over the companion-way.

Our small, circumscribed world daily grows in importance in our estimation. We know intimately the characters, tastes, and histories of our companions. We take each other's photographs, and exchange warm professions of friendship; we advise each other about the future, and confide the incidents of the past. We play draughts and quoits and cards; we get together in corners and criticise the missionaries and are criticised by them--and all the while go steadily westward and westward, driven by wind and steam. . . . With all our brown sails spread, we fleet through the moonlight with stately courtesyings. Calm mornings dawn behind us. We sail under the vast arches of rainbows that rise out of the water but half a mile away from the ship and span the whole heavens; and at evening the sun falls into the sea, straight before us, amid unimaginable flames and glories, where for an hour we rise and fall on the heaving bosom of the ocean in a great dream-world of jewelled splendor of sapphire and gold, of purple and pearl. . . .

This lonely vessel swarms with life. Down in the steerage are over four hundred yellow people. . . . All sorts and conditions of Chinamen going home with their earnings. Many are merchants who have a merchant's pass, which enables them to return to America when their business across the water is finished. One old gentleman with an iron-gray pigtail is a "Forty-niner." He came to California during the gold fever, and is now going home to die in China, having thriftily calculated that it costs less to cross the waters alive than it does in a coffin. He was rich in those early days, but, as he explains in fluent and profane American, fan-tan, poker, euchre, and horse races have reduced his store to an immodest competence. However, as he nears the Chinese shore he feels he can afford to wear a magnificent and lurid pair of brocaded trousers, of the sort popular in China when he left, and still--after forty years--of the very latest fashion.

Down in these Chinese quarters, placed where he can catch the best of the healing salt breezes, is a young fellow of six-and-twenty, who lies motionless all day, with crossed hands and half-closed eyes. These hands and the sunken face are the color of old wax, as impassive as if indeed they were cut from such substance.

It is common among the emigrants to America to fall sick with a consumption and to struggle back in this way to die at home. He seems afraid to breath or move, lest he should waste the failing oil or snuff out the dying flame ere he reaches his yearned-for home--the Flowery Kingdom--the Celestial Empire!

On the after-deck fan-tan rages all day long; also an intricate game of chess, or dominoes, when a less dangerous amusement is desired. Forward there is a space for women, where five or six retroussŠ-eyed females find a temporary home. They are gentle, mild-faced little creatures, who are quick to give smile for smile and answer English amiabilities with what appears to be equally amiable Chinese. All the sailors are Chinamen, and are popular with the commanders. They are obedient, not given to strikes at inconvenient moments, and are under the control of a boatswain, one of their countrymen with a keen, shrewd face and an air of unquestioned authority. He hires them and pays them their wages, and the owners reckon with him alone. He is a person of consequence and wealth, and owns much real estate in San Francisco, sufficient proof that the Chinese, as the white Jack Tar, is the victim of fraud and oppression.

These ships, like those of the merchant Antonio, voyage to the East for cargoes of tea, silk, and spices. There are three lines between China and America; two, the Pacific Mail and the Oriental and Occidental--controlled by the Central Pacific Railway magnates, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford--have their termini in the United States, and the Canadian Mail sails from Vancouver. They carry out to China returning subjects of the yellow emperor, passengers for the East, flour, Connecticut clocks, hats, shoes, and such select assortments of Yankee notions as are required by the Barbarian.

Returning, they fetch hundreds of bales of raw silk, worth $700 apiece, which must be rushed across the continent immediately upon arrival, and have left the ship and are on their way across the country to the Eastern mills before the passengers have landed. The usual cargo is from 1200 to 1300 bales, and in June the tea trade begins, 1700 to 2700 tons in every ship--the whole of the Formosa crop, some 6,000,000 tons, comes to us. The English will not drink the light, perfumed Oolong. They demand something coarser and stronger. Spices, pepper, and tapioca come from Singapore, and gambier in great quantities for coloring American beer, with thousands of bales of gunny-sacks from Calcutta for American wheat, and, from Manila, hemp and jute.

At last there comes a day when one rises in the morning and the sailors, pointing to the horizon, say, "That is Japan," and one cries with cheerful excitement, "Yes! Yes!" though there is nothing but the same monotonous sea and sky visible to the unpractised eye.

The missionaries all land here, and are full of happiness at arriving at the scene of their labors to save immortal souls. The Chinese steerage clatter more noisily than ever, pleased to behold this outlying portal of their home. The Japanese poet Kachi, returning from travels in America, where he has been arranging for translations of his works into English, lifts his head again. He is a grave, mysterious-eyed person, who has not spoken to any one during the voyage, and has usually had his face--his dark, smooth, mask-like face--hidden behind a French novel.

This face is lit now with a fine patriotic glow as a delicate gray cloud grows up along the edge of the water and slowly a vast cone-like cumulus, a lofty rosy could, takes shape and form, gathers clearness of outline, deepens its hue of pink and pearl, melts softly into the gray beneath, soars sharply into the blue above, and reveals-Fujiyama . . . the divine mountain!

Having seen it, one no longer marvels that it dominates the Japanese imagination; that every fan, screen, and jar, every piece of lacquer and porcelain, bears somewhere its majestic, its exquisite outline. Twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet high, it rises up alone and unmarred by surrounding peaks; alone in fair calm beauty--the highest mountain in all the islands. In the old Aino tongue--the ainos whom the warlike Japanese conquered and drove northward--"Fuji" signified "Mother of Fire," and the Japanese added the word "yama," their general term for all mountains. For more than two hundred years the Mother of Fire has been clad in snows and has made no sign. Traces of terrible ancient rages lie along her ravaged sides; but her passions are all stilled, peace and purity crown her; and he who hath seen Fuji-yama's fair head lifted out of the blue sea and flushed with the dream of the coming day layeth his hand upon his mouth and is silent, but the memory of it passeth not away while he lives.

THIRD STAGE

And it came to pass that on the morning of the 8th day of December we rose up and perceived that we had come unto Fan-land . . . to the Islands of Porcelain . . . to Shikishima--the Country of Chrysanthemums. The place across whose sky the storks always fly by day, and the ravens by night--where cherry-branches with pink-and-white blossoms grow out of nothing at all to decorate the foreground, and where ladies wear their eyes looped up in the corners, and gowns in which it is so impossible that any two-legged female should walk that they pass their lives smiling and motionless upon screen and jars. 

. . . Sailing so long due west, we had at last reached the East. The real East, not east of anywhere, but the East . . . the birthplace of Man, and of his Religions . . . of Poetry and Porcelains, of Tradition, and of Architecture. And I who had come to it from the country of common-sense, of steam-ploughs and newspaper enterprise, bowed my head reverently in the portal of this great Temple of the World, and fell upon my knees, awed by its mysterious age and vastness. . . . My heart within me was stirred, and I was led to great recklessness in the use of capital letters.

There lies here, by the gates of the East, a land, as we discovered, stranger and more wonderful even than we had dreamed. Captain Kempson had steered us in sixteen days from the coast of America to where a mountain of pink pearl rose out of the sea; and when the gray clouds about its base resolved themselves into land, we found they were the green hills of fairyland! . . . It is revealed to those who live long enough and who go up and down the earth, and to and fro upon the face of it, that man has never conceived an ideal that is not somewhere a reality. There are women living as beautiful as any of the marble Venuses; there are even men as pure and high-minded as Galahad; there are Edens in existence--perchance, somewhere, there is something nearly resembling Paradise--and certainly the enchanting fairy dreams of our childhood, ravished from us by the cruel misrepresentation of our elders, have an actual existence, yet more fantastic and delicious than our baby minds could ever have imagined, in these islands lying hard by the coast of China. . . . Let no one scoffingly set this down as a figure of speech. All who have every set foot on these shores bear the same testimony to the elfin witchery of Nippon--the land of the rising sun. There may be something suggestive, in this name, of that eternal tie between youth and the dawn, because certainly here the people are still children, and possess all a child's sweetness, simplicity, and imaginativeness. . . . I spent, alas! Less than two days in these fairy islands; but all ballad literature declares with great positiveness (see Thomas the Rhymer, the ballad of May-Janet, Mary of Caldon-Low, and other notorious examples) that, having spent even the briefest moment in the Land of the Fays engenders an unquenchable yearning that must some day, some hour, bring one back again--and with this I comfort my heart. . . . 
We double a headland, pass a slim white pharos, and we make our way up the long bay to Yokohama. The town has been in existence only since 1859, when Japan opened a few ports to foreign trade, but already it is a place of size and importance; for what the Japanese did, they did thoroughly. They jettied the harbor, built ample wharves and go-downs, and bade their own people confine themselves to the inner town across the canal, and not encroach upon the Europeans.

The queerest craft come to meet us in the bay--light-winged junks with gray and russet sails, so carelessly and crazily built that were the sea to but give them a playful slap she would crush them in an instant to kindling-wood. Their feebleness insures her gentleness, it would seem, for they spread their great butterfly wings and skim along without fear, going far afield for the fishing. Many large ships lie at anchor in the harbor --American men-of-war, English, French, and German merchant vessels, and a few neat Japanese coasters. I am told the Japanese were childishly impatient of the foreign tutelage necessary to acquire knowledge of steam navigation, and in haste to try the experiment of running a boat themselves. Starting off with a native crew for the first time, all went well until it was necessary to stop, and this they suddenly discovered they had forgotten how to do. Great was the panic, and she was driving fast on shore, when one bethought him to put the helm hard down; and then they steamed round and round in a circle for hours until steam was exhausted, and the boat stopped of her own volition. . . . After which they went to school again for a bit and learned steam navigation in all its branches.

A cloud of sampans descend upon us as we anchor--craft as crazy as the junks--made of three unpainted boards lightly fastened together, with a sharp prow and wide, high stern, across which the standing boatman lays a long oar, and waggles it carelessly in the water, attaining thereby an astonishing speed. Like a certain famous epitaph, it is "simple but sufficient."

. . . These boatmen are the vanguard of elves from Elfland--small, lithe creatures with good-looking yellow countenances, bearing no resemblance to the flat-faced Chinese, and with thick, shining black locks, through which is twisted a blue fillet. Their dress is of dark blue cotton; sometimes the gown-shape called a kimono, and worn by both sexes; but for the most part a costume much like that worn in England in the time of Henry II.--cloth hose to the waist, a short jerkin, and loose sleeveless coat reaching to the hips. These blue coats have on the back a great white circle surrounding decorative Japanese characters which set forth the owner's occupation, so that he who runs may read. The intention is business-like, but utilitarianism in Japan is inseparable from the picturesque, and these portable advertisements only add a new charm to the wearer's delightful queerness. There are boys of ten or twelve in some of the boats with the men--quaint little brats with varying patterns shaved on the tops of their heads, entering into the contest to secure part of the carrying trade with the stern and enthusiastic vigor known only to the small boy of all countries.

I attach myself for the time being to a party of agreeable Americans. One of them, a pretty brown-eyed girl named Madge, finds everything as dear and astonishing a delight as do I; but the Lady--the Other Lady--and the Lay-Brother have been here before, and, knowing the greater joys still in store for us, are impatient and superior. The Gentleman from Germany--always pleased in the pleasure of others--is indulgently sympathetic. We--Madge and I--secretly desire to be ferried over to the pier by one of these elfish ferrymen; but the others are so lofty that we meekly submit to allow a commonplace steam-launch to set us on shore, making the journey with the missionaries, who have much exaltation and baggage.

. . . I move in a joyous dream. Can this be I? . . . I, to whom Japan had seemed as fair and vague as heaven--a place to which only the excessively virtuous and fortunate ever went? . . . And, lo! I, in all the fulness of earthly imperfection, am permitted to see it! . . . 
More mediaeval folk in blue stand about on the stone pier and welcome us with friendly smiles, and we charter their jinrikishas to take us to the hotel. Now, the jinrikisha is exactly the vehicle in which one would expect to ride in this land of fairy children--large perambulators that hold one person comfortably; but instead of being trundled from behind by a white-capped nursemaid, one of the Henry II. gentlemen, who wears also straw sandals and an enormous blue mushroom hat on his head, ensconces himself between the little shafts in front and prances noiselessly away with it. He has legs as light and muscular as a thoroughbred horse, and can spin along with the 'rikisha at the rate of five miles an hour. He can, with few intervals for rest, keep this up all day; he will charge you seventy-five cents for the whole; he will not be winded at all, and will be in a gay and charming temper when the day is done. . . . 
Our way lies along the Bund, a broad, handsome street on the water-front, with a fringe of slim pine-trees strange of outline as are those one is familiar with upon fans. Other jinrikishas are scampering about. Tonsured doll-babies in flowered gowns, such as one buys at home in the Oriental shops, are walking about here alive, and flying queer-shaped kites, with a sort of calm unconscious elfishness befitting dwellers in fairyland. Two little Japanese ladies with pink cheeks, and black hair clasped with jade pins, toddle by on wooden pattens that clack pleasantly on the pavement. Their kimonos are of gay crape, and their sashes tied behind like bright-tinted wings. Every one--even the funny little gendarme who stands outside of this sentry-box like a toy soldier--gives us back smile for smile.

The Grand Hotel is at the upper end of the Bund, and here another specimen of the Moyen-ƒge in his stocking feet shows us into beautiful rooms facing the water-rooms with steam-heat and electric bells! . . . The darkness closes down swiftly, but charming things are still to be seen from our veranda. The air is crisp and keen; gay cried and clinking pattens tinkle in melodious confusion from the street below. The 'rikishas have swinging from their shafts now crimped pink and white paper-lanterns, and flit by in the dark like fire-flies. A broad yellow moon rises up from the other side of the water and turns the bay to wrinkled gold, against which the ships and junks show delicately black, as if drawn with a pen; and a few clear black lines of cloud are etched across the moon's path. . . .

After dinner we are lucky enough to fall into the hands of Lieutenant McDonald. He is a paymaster in the American Navy, and has been here two years. He knows the place well, and offers to be our guide to-night through the native town. In the flowery hotel-court we find our 'rikishas standing in a row in the moonlight, each with one of the pretty lanterns swinging; and we too flit away behind our sandalled steeds. Only the whir of our wheels and our calls and laughter sound through the city's quiet, moon-washed ways. Here in the European town the houses of two stories of stone stand flush with the narrow asphalt-paved street. A tiny foot-path runs under the shadow of their tiled caves; but as these are paved with little cobble-stones, and the roadway is smooth and clean as a table, no one by any chance ever walks in the foot-paths. Occasionally we meet a figure enveloped in dark, shapeless drapery, or a grave, bland Chinese merchant goes by on his soundless cork soles, but this is the business quarter, and people have gone to their homes on the Bund, or upon the Bluff, where consuls and foreigners of importance reside.

We skim around corners with a shrill ki-yi! of warning; debouch into a great square upon which churches and public buildings face; cross a broad canal where acres of sampans are huddled for the night, and find on the other side Shichiu, the native town. Hancho-dori lies before us, the wide main thoroughfare from which spring hundreds of narrow branches, all swarming with a frolicsome, chattering crowd tinkling about in pattens, their multitudinous tapping making a vibrant musical undertone to the sound of the many voices. . . .

The houses, delicate little match-boxes of thin, unpainted wood, fifteen or twenty feet high, and divided into two stories, crowd close together, and give upon the street. The fronts of these houses--indeed, the greater part of the walls all around, are sashes of many tiny panes glazed with white, semi-transparent paper, through which the inner light shines as from a lantern; and the shop fronts are mere curtains of bamboo, rolled up during business hours, and let down when the shop is closed for the night.

. . . Business is not nearly over yet. The Japanese are as little inclined to early bed as the Chinese, it seems, and the tide of trade runs strong. . . . From all the eaves swing soft bubbles of tinted light-lanterns of many shapes and sizes. The shops are lit and busy, and contain every need, from crabs to curios, Japanese flesh is heir to. Here and there cluster flocks of light, portable booths, each also with a swaying lantern, where steaming tea is sold in thimble-cups; where saki may be drunk hot and hot, poured from long-necked porcelain bottles, or trays of queer, toothsome-looking sweetmeats are to be had for coins of infinitesimal value. Along the street lie heaps of fresh vegetables--making pretty bouquets of color, all clean and ready for the pot--or fruits of many sorts massed with skill and beauty; . . . little red oranges in bamboo nets, set about with their own green leaves; plums, pomaloes, and fruits whose names we do not know. Everything, everywhere, is radiantly clean, dainty, and inviting. All the folks, too, are gay and voluble. The children play about unchidden; and one might imagine it, if not corrected, some Festival of Lanterns, the place is so joyous, bright-tinted, and fantastic under the smiling, benignant moon. . . .

We are on our way to the theatre--one of the humbler sort, where acrobats do their feats for a few cents, where stage and auditorium are on a level, and both merely platforms. A little gallery to one side is reserved for the moon-eyed babies with whimsically shaved heads; but they come down occasionally and rollic about as they wish, quite unreproved. They are never harsh with children in this fair country, and in return the children display a courteous tolerance of the foibles of their elders that is extremely soothing. A group of tumblers on the stage are going through some supple contortions to the sound of a shrill little pipe and a blattering wooden drum, playing out of time with one another. The whole front of the theatre, a curtain of matting, is rolled up at intervals and, when the feat in progress is at its most thrilling climax, is let fall. This artful proceeding stimulates the interest of the passers-by to such poignancy that they succumb in platoons to the pangs of curiosity, and so crowd the little platform that we depart hastily. 

. . . More moon and lanterns, more laughter and flutter, more clacking of sandals, and then a Japanese Madame Tussaud's, with pleasing little horrors in wax at the entrance as earnest of more of the same cheerful entertainment within. Here is better music, that, during a na‹ve pantomime of Japanese ghosts, plays what negroes call a "lonesome tune," in a soft minor key. This does not hold us long, for farther up the street is a large and fashionable playhouse, where we may see the best talent of Nippon. At the box-office are piles of flat sticks, six inches long and two wide, painted with numbers in the native character, which, inquiry reveals, are shoe checks for the many sandals hanging on rows of pegs by the door; for here, as in every other house in Japan, one enters in stocking-feet. In consideration of our being benighted foreigners, we are allowed to retain our shoes. 

. . . The interior is large and lofty. The common folk occupy the level floor of the pit, marked into squares, where family parties sit on small wadded rugs, and are quite at home, bringing their little charcoal braziers to warm their fingers, furnish lights for their tiny pipes, and keep the teapot steaming. The galleries on two sides are divided into matting-lined boxes, one of which they furnish with chairs, seeing that we display small skill in sitting on our heels. We enter during an entr'acte; and before the stage, which is not deep, but lofty, sways lightly in the draught a gay crape curtain. The men in the pit are smoking or curled up in their rugs snatching a nap, while the women drink tea and gossip, and the children romp all over the house. High up on either side of the stage comes from a latticed box the sound of the samsien and other stringed instruments that make a soft, plaintive, and pleasing music. The play has been going on for three weeks and is to end to-night. A gong sounds, the children are recalled, the men wake, and the curtain being pulled aside shows the front of a Japanese house. Two maids appear from a side door and wait respectfully on their hands and knees for the entrance of their mistress, a man very skilfully painted and gorgeously arrayed, but somewhat too masculine to satisfactorily represent the babyish roundness of the real thing. This lady has affairs of great pith and moment to convey to the maids, who make timidly respectful suggestions, which evidently carry small comfort, for the lady retires depressedly. Her lord, followed by his attendants, next appears--an extremely well-bred and aristocratic-looking person in the daimio dress with the two swords; and one judges by his manner that he can add nothing to the cheerfulness of the situation. While matters are at this stage of melancholy, a great clash of music startles the audience, the curtain is drawn aside from a little room on the opposite side of the house, and a magnificent personage appears, who paces with an awe-inspiring strut along the little raised pathway that leads from this room to the stage. The daimio hastens with his attendants to meet him. It is the great shogun himself, stern of mien, and with fierce, orgulous brows; a very impressive figure, notwithstanding he wears black velvet trousers a yard and a half too long for him, and is accompanied by a train-bearer who skips about and disposes this superfluous length in graceful folds whenever his master comes to a standstill. . . . He is the embodiment of the sterner side of the Japanese character--the aristocratic spirit that kept alive a haughty feudalism long after Europe had forgotten it; the haughty pride and courage that bid a gentleman expiate his offences only by his own hand; the spirit that has allowed no conqueror to ever set foot on Japanese soil, and still makes these people the bravest and freest race in Asia. . . . 
This tremendous personage makes short work of the handsome daimio, and stalks away after pronouncing some decree to which the noble bows his head in calm acquiescence. . . . Madame and the maids are still more unhappy. . . . The shogun appears to have suggested the advisability of the "happy despatch," and the lady fails to appreciate this little attention on the part of her sovereign. An aged and garrulous mendicant next enters, and one guesses at once that this is the element of comedy which is to relieve the gloom of the situation, and probably the humble deus ex machinƒ who will arrest the tragedy. His acting is extremely clever, and for myself I should like to see how it all turns out; but the smile of the gentleman from Germany is growing wan, and the lay-brother, who has no chair, is becoming distinctly cross, and so we go home.

The shops are shut by this time, and we see some curious little domestic episodes shadowed on the paper window-sashes, when householders thoughtlessly pass between them and the lamp. The European town is flooded with a high tide of moonlight, and we are, it seems, the only ones who wake sweeping in a long, swift line through the streets in our silent fairy carriages with the rosy lantern swinging. . . . 
A nipping and an eager air blows among the rose-trees in the court next morning when Madge and I start out for early shopping. Lieutenant McDonald, magnificent in brown cords and laced Russia-leather riding-boots, offers us his pony carriage, but we scoff at anything less foreign than a jinrikisha, and set off together for Benton-dori, the fashionable shopping-street of Shichiu. In spite of the fall in the thermometer, the spirits of the public in general appear in no way chilled. The bare feet in straw sandals look red and uncomfortable, but the owners of them merely acquire great plumpness of appearance by adding three or four more cotton-wadded kimonos to their costume, tuck their chilly fingers away in their ample sleeves, and laugh at the passing discomfort. Everything looks ridiculously tiny by day, and deliciously absurd. One has a feeling that it is all a game that one is playing to amuse the children. We sit on the edge of the little platform that forms the floor of the ship, and, in the baby talk that is called pigeon-English, bargain with the amiable shopkeeper seated on his own heels and within easy reach of all his goods. Just so one used to play "keep store" in the nursery when one sold one's toys for astonishing sums to wealthy playmates whose purses were bursting with scraps of torn envelopes--fiat money of arbitrary value. We have been instructed not to pay more than half that is asked, but the prices are so delightfully low that we give them joyfully, and without haggling. We wander from shop to shop, received with an air of affectionate friendliness everywhere; we warm our fingers at many different braziers, and might drink little thimble-cups of tea at every hospitable place of business were we so minded. The really valuable bric-…-brac is costly here as elsewhere; but many charming things in common use among the people, pretty proofs of their universal love of beauty, are to be picked up for a mere trifle.

In the silk-shops we find the very poetry of fabrics: . . . crapes like milky opals, with the pale iris hues of rainbows; crapes with the faint purple and pearl of clear sunset skies, embroidered with wheeling flights of white storks. Out of a sweet-smelling box comes a mass of shining stuff that the low-voiced fourteenth-century-looking shopkeeper calls by three musical syllables, which, translated, signify the Garments of the Dawn. Its threads shimmer like the crystals of dry snow, and amid its folds the whiteness blushes to rose, deepens to gold, or pales to blue, while through it here and there runs a sort of impalpable cloudiness like a morning mist. He shows us moon-cloths, duskily azure with silver gleams; . . . crapes, pearl-white and rich with needlework in patterns of delicate bamboo fronds or loose-petalled chrysanthemum-blossoms, . . . fairy garments all, woven of rainbows and moonbeams!

. . . We are in the train going to Tokio. We have lingered too long in the enchanted wardrobes, Madge and I, and are in disgrace with the others for our tardiness, which has nearly lost them the train, . . . but the world is too much to our liking to-day for even this to depress us, and we feel that the gentleman from Germany is secretly on our side. It is a funny train, as absurdly toy-like and doll-housey as is everything else in this country; and our destinies are committed to-day into the hands of a sweet-mannered gentleman in a gray kimono and an American hat, who is to guide us amid the beauties of his country's capital. . . . Delicious little pictures run past our car windows, astonishing us with the sudden revelation of what nonsense the Occident has talked about the conventionality of Japanese art, when, in truth, it is the most exquisite fidelity to the nature the artist has seen about him. The world the Japanese artist has painted has been the world just as it exists in his own country, and, moreover, he has in his art caught and expressed with perfect and subtle veracity its atmosphere of gay grotesquerie--of delicate fantasticality--its crisp and fragile fairy likeness--the soul of things about him that has so far escaped the brush of every foreign artist endeavoring to portray the outward forms of things Japanese. . . .

The charm of all we see from our car--the Tokaido (the great imperial highway that intersects the whole empire), the queer little farm-houses and railway stations, and even the water-soaked paddy-fields, reaped of their rice-lies in the exquisite, faultless cleanliness and propriety of it all. Nothing is out of place; nothing requires allowance and forgiveness; . . . all is beautifully posed and arranged as if sitting to have itself instantaneously photographed; and the Other Lady, recognizing this attitude of expectancy, the click of her camera is heard in the land. 

. . . Arrived at Tokio, we go to the residence of the American minister, who is very agreeably housed, and where we find-as in all private dwellings throughout the East--a most astonishing profusion of flowery plants blooming and bourgeoning in every corner of the mansion. We tell the American girl with the camera and the small feet good-bye, for she is remaining here as a guest, and we see the minister's carriage drive up, accompanied with two out-runners in gorgeous native liveries of orange and blue. These out-runners accompany all folk of importance in Japan, and keep pace with the horses without fatigue. A fine, picturesque bit of mediaeval swagger they make. . . .

We take out tiffin in a little latticed glove-box of a tea-house, the polished daintiness of whose interior will not permit of our wearing our shoes; and a grotesque spectacle they make--those American shoes, standing in a row just inside the entrance while we tiptoe awkwardly and shamefacedly in our stocking-feet up the stairs. A mild diffused light through the paper panes illuminates our tiny upper chamber, whose only furnishings are sweet-smelling mattings, a kakamono hanging on the wall, and a tall jar full of red-berried branches in the corner. We are served by a moon-faced little maid in a flowered gown, who bows at each entry and draws in her breath to signify what a privilege it is to breathe the same air with us, . . . one of the customs of a national courtesy so thorough and far-reaching that even the domestic animals are civilly addressed as Mr. Cat and Mr. Dog. . . . She brings us braziers to warm our fingers and wadded rugs to sit upon, tailorwise, and serves us delicious tea, sugarless and straw-colored, in tiny cups without handles, and bowls of rice across which are laid crisp, freshly broiled eels--a delightful dish that we eat with polished black chopsticks.

. . . The 'rikishas race away with us quite to the other side of town--past great forts and fosses, past the mikado's palaces and gardens, to the famous temples at Shiba. The road is smooth and broad and overshadowed by pines. A superb gilded and lacquered gateway admits us to the temple grounds, and here the guide goes in search of a shaven-headed priest who will show us his treasures. Immediately before us stands a lovely red temple, rich with gold and carvings and lacquered figures, and with a marble-paved veranda polished as onyx; but we cannot wait to examine it. We go to the left and climb the hill by stone steps strewn with crimson petals of the camellia blossoms. . . . At the end of an avenue of tall gray stone lanterns--where lights shine during the great religious festivals--stands the tomb of Ieymitsu, the son of Ieyasn, the great shogun who usurped supreme authority and reduced the mikado to the position of a primate. But the little finger of Ieymitsu was thicker than his father's loins. He consolidated the feudal system, and chivalry under his rule achieved its noblest development; Japanese arms were feared and respected abroad and at home; and under the sun of his kingly favor Japanese art blossomed into its supreme, consummate flower. Today the curios of his period are worth their weight in gold, and all the knightly traditions of the land cluster about his name and reign.

Laying down a life of power, he yearned for an immortality of beauty--to be magnificent and impressive even in death; and, choosing this spot, he spent millions in glorifying his last resting-place. He had a nice taste in tombs, had this splendid old Japanese. The hill is clothed in pines, through which the light winds go softly sighing. The westering sun shines slantingly along the green arcades and makes golden shadows across the path we have come. The mild-moving air has stolen red blossoms from the glossy-leaved camellia-trees and shred them upon the hoary gray lanterns and mossy stairs. . . . Never monarch slept among sweeter verdure, space, and calm. . . . The tomb has, as have all these shrines and temples, walls of a deep rich red, whose clear color three centuries have not dimmed. . . . Above is a broad frieze of gorgeous carving--dragons, birds, lotus, and chrysanthemums tangled in fantastic intricacies, and all lacquered and gilded with such honest pains that Time's teeth cannot gnaw through the color or his breath tarnish the gold. Above the frieze leans the green and gray tiled roof, with its fretted ridges and airy, upturned gables, of a fine lightness and unmatched grace of outline. . . . The interior is octagon-sided and mosaic-paved, and up from the centre, where the great shogun lies, curls the cup of a giant stone lotus, whose calyx is the jewelled shrine, springing to the roof which rests on a ring of polished columns, and each of these in turn on a base of lotus leaves. Everywhere, from pavement, shrine, and wall, shines the shogun's golden crest of three lotus leaves meeting at the stems. . . . Space does not avail to tell of the splendors of this tomb, . . . the plating of gold and silver bronze; the myriad-tinted lacquers, hard and polished as gems; the untarnished gilding, the inlaying of precious stones, and, most wonderful of all, the grace and gorgeousness of the myriad delicate fantasies wrought out by art to soothe the king's last sleep.

. . . "Et ego in Arcadia--I too have been in fairyland!" I cry to the lay-brother as we stroll away in the mild sunshine and down the flower-strewn stairway. He had warned me of the exceeding great loveliness of the place, and, having seen it, I am fain to declare that I forgive fate in advance for any future trick, because of this one day of unmarred delight.

We race across the city again in our 'rikishas to the great park of Uyeno, to see the sun go down behind Fujiyama . . . to look out across the city's vast hive with its million or more of folk whose myriad lights begin to twinkle in the violet dusk. . . . We worship a moment before a gigantic, calm-lidded stone Buddha set on a little hill, amid a thicket of roses.

Then the railroad again, . . . a broad, yellow moon shining on the ever-present Fujiyama, . . . regretful farewells to the charming Americans and Lieutenant McDonald, and then the visit to fairyland is over. . . . I must pass on in my swift course, and be ready for new sights and friends.

FOURTH STAGE

Hong Kong! . . . I like the name of my next port. It has a fine clangorous significance, like two slow loud notes of some great brazen-lunged bell. . . . Hong-Kong!

We have one more glimpse of Fujiyama the next morning as Japan sinks out of sight. . . . During the day the young China-man with the pallid waxen hands dies. He has struggled hard to keep the flame burning until he sees his own land, but the crisp breath of the Japanese coast puffs it suddenly out. A canvas screen is hung across one corner of the steerage deck, and the doctor goes back and forth from behind it. . . . They will carry him back to his country, though he will not be glad or aware. But the sea knows she is being defrauded of her rights, and wakes and rages. She comes in the nights and beats thunderously with her great fists upon our doors. She leaps to look over our bulwarks for her hidden victim; she roars with wrath and will not be appeased. For two days we steam in the face of the northwest gale she has raised, and for three the ship plunges like a spurred horse. I find that bodily I am proof now against seasickness, but my temper has a violent attack of mal de mer. It makes me bitterly cross to go leaping and plunging about the ship, not to be able to keep my seat, and to gradually collect my soup and entr‚es in my lap; so I retire to bed, wedge myself in tight with pillows, and go steadily through every word the ship's library affords on the subject of Japan. I am refreshed and cheered to find that the writer of each book fails, as signally as I shall fail, to convey any adequate idea of the fairy charms of the Land of Chrysanthemums. . . . Shall one then paint a dragon-fly with a whitewash brush? 

. . . Nevertheless, I gather from these books much confirmatory of my own swiftly gathered impression. The very faults of the Japanese are such as are misdemeanors in adults but quite forgivable in children. They are hopelessly immodest, with the unconscious shamelessness of babies, and they fib imaginatively with an infant's inability to discern the relative value of truth and falsehood. They are brave with the headlong courage of the child who is ignorant of the meaning of danger, and in matters of honor they have youth's reckless passionate exaltation. They are unfailingly sweet-tempered and courteous. Their artistic conscientiousness ascends into the realm of morality. They are frugal and temperate; they detest all ugliness, dirt, and squalor; they are unique; they are delightful--they are Japanese! . . .

On Sunday, the 15th, we reach Hong Kong. The sea turns to a cool profound emerald, and we descry again on the horizon the bamboo wings of the fishing and coasting junks. These sails are somewhat larger and deeper of hue than those of Japan, and still more resemble the fans of giant yellow and russet butterflies.

. . . More treeless mountains rise out of the green waters. They are broken and rugged; of volcanic origin; and where the scant herbage fails their naked sides show tawny as a lion's hide. It is one of the three beautiful harbors of the world, the water winding deeply inland between the hills, and flowing around island mountains ringed with girdles of foam. At one o'clock we are in the broad antechamber of the port, known as the Lyee-Moon, and are signalled from the lofty peak to the inhabitants of the town lying at its foot. At two o'clock we drop anchor in the roadstead amid a great host of shipping of all character and nations--twenty-three days out from San Francisco. The White Star people had instructed Captain Kempson to make all due haste for my sake, and it is one of the swiftest voyages ever known at this season of the year, when the winds are contrary, coming to the west. We were sixteen days to Japan, where we remained thirty-six hours, and five days from Yokohama to Hong Kong. 
The island of Hong Kong is a cluster of lofty abrupt hills with scanty vegetation, seized by England in 1842 after a struggle with China. At that time the town was an insignificant fishing village, but the value of the site was great commercially and strategically. It is a convenient and safe harbor for the squadron detailed to watch and menace the Russian navy in the Pacific; and the English have elevated the village into a flourishing city and made it the fourth shipping port of the world. The harbor is navigable for the largest merchant vessels and men-of-war in existence, and is perfectly sheltered and easy of access.

As in Japan, sampans swarm about us as soon as we are made fast to the buoy, but they are far less picturesque than were those. Each sampan wears a bamboo hood in the stern, and here the owner houses his wife and rears his family. A brood of babies is in each one of these little hutches, and while the pigtailed subject of the Celestial Emperor stands and rows in the bow, his helpmeet sculls in the stern with a long oar that serves as a tiller. The Chinese woman of the working class, I find, decided centuries ago the question still in its stormy infancy with us--of the divided skirt. She clothes herself in a pair of wide black trousers, a loose tunic, jade earrings and cork-soled shoes, and is ready for all the emergencies of life. Should they take the form of marriage with a sampan owner, she will but rarely set her foot on shore again, but will, in common with something like 20,000 of the "water population" of Hong Kong, work, sleep, eat, bear her children, rear them, and die in this crazy little boat.

I am very regretful at leaving the Oceanic, where I have received so much kindness; but "hateful is the dark blue ocean" after more than three weeks of it, and delightful the thought of even three precious days on land. I am to stay with personal friends in Hong Kong in order that I may see something of domestic life in the East; and I am taken ashore in their private steam launch. Chairs and bearers are waiting for us on the dock--comfortable fauteuils of bamboo, trimmed with silver and supported by long bamboo poles. This is even more amusing than the 'rikishas. There are four Chinamen for each chair, dressed in my friend's livery--loose trousers and tunic of white cotton bordered with rose color. Their feet are bare and their queues are gathered into Psyche knots, on the back of their heads, like the hair of the shop girls in America.

They lift the poles to their shoulders and start off in a swift swinging trot. We pass across the narrow strip of level land that lies on the water's edge--the business quarter of the city built handsomely and solidly of native stone--and begin to mount the broad steep ways that lead to the residence quarter. These are cool and shadowy with great trees, with the clattering feathered spears of the tall bamboos, with gigantic ferns, and prodigious satiny leaves of tropical lilies. The streets are paved with asphalt and have no sidewalks; here and there they resolve themselves into broad flights of shallow steps up which the bearers carry us with perfect ease. . . . The verdure is magnificent; the town is submerged in it, and flowers are everywhere. On every wall stand rows of earthen jars full of greenery and blossom--rows on rows of them in the courtyards--more rows on both ends of every flight of steps, and on all balcony railings. Every nook and corner that will hold a far is filled with bloom, and the rarest orchids are strewn carelessly about, industriously producing flowers, in delicious provincial ignorance of their own value and of what they might exact in the way of expensive attention.

We meet the most astonishing varieties of the human race. All sorts and conditions of Chinamen--elegant dandies in exquisitely pale-tinted brocades; grave merchants and compradors, richly but soberly clad; neat amahs with the tiny deformed Chinese feet, sitting at the street corners, taking in sewing by the day; street sellers of tea, shrimp, fruit, sweetmeats, and rice; women working side by side with the men, mending the streets, . . . horrible old women, weazened and wrinkled beyond all imagining, all the femininity shrivelled out of them, their only head-covering a bit of black cloth across their seamed and humble foreheads, and the last pathetic spark of the female instinct for adornment desplaying itself in the big jade and silver rings in their ears.

. . . From windows shaded by light bamboo blinds look out coarse olive faces--heavy and dull of eye, repulsively sensual. These are Portuguese; descendants of the hardy sailors who explored and ruled these southern seas before the English supplanted them. They have bred in with the natives everywhere and have grown an indolent mongrel race. . . . Plump and prosperous-looking gentlemen go by in European dress and with tight-fitting purple satin coal-hods on their heads. Their complexions are dark and their features--dug out of a mat of astonishingly thick beards--are aggravatedly Hebraic in their cast. They are Parsees, and look uncommonly like the lost tribes--exhibiting also, I am told, the same eminent abilities in business probably possessed by those much-sought-for Hebrew truants.

. . . At the corner stands a haughty jewel-eyed prince of immense stature--straight and lithe as a palm--in whose high-featured bronze countenance are unfathomable potentialities of pride and passion.

. . . He wears a soldier's dress and sword, and a huge scarlet turban of the most intricate convolutions. I cry out with astonishment at the sight of this superb creature.

"Is it an emperor?" I demand, in breathless admiration.

"An emperor! Poof! it's only a Sikh policeman. There are hundreds about the place quite as splendid as he."

. . . When the Arabs who had seen Europeans only in trousers fled before the magnificent onslaught of the kilted Highlanders at Tel-el-Kebir, they exclaimed in amazement:

"If these are the Scotch women, what must the men be!" so, though a bit dashed, I say to myself, "If these are the Sikh policemen, what must their princes be?" and secretly resolve to go some day and discover.

It gives me my first real impression of the power of England, who tames these mountain lions and sets them to do her police duty,. It would seem incredible that this rosy commonplace Tommy Atkins who comes swaggering down the street in his scarlet coat can be the weapon that tamed the fine creature in the turban. . . . What is it makes this cheerfully vulgar Anglo-Saxon the lord of the Hindoo? . . . Physically he is not the Sikh's superior, and in profound and passionate sentiment, if one may judge by the countenance, the Hindoo is infinitely above the Briton. Nor is the latter greater in courage or dignity, for these Indians made a noble resistance to English encroachment, and after submission were enrolled in the army of the conquerors as their bravest and most loyal native troops. . . . What is the secret? . . . Is it more beef and mutton perhaps--or more of submission to orders and power of self-discipline? . . . Here comes one of the conquerors of India, a kilted Highlander, swinging down the road in his plaided petticoats, with six inches of bare stalwart pink legs showing, and a fine hearty self-confidence in his mien that signifies his utter disbelief in the power of anything human to conquer him.

We leave this olla-podrida of nations behind, and mount into a broad street curved around the flank of the hill. On the upper side of it is the heavy wall of the Portuguese convent, once painted a lovely light blue, and now freaked and stained a thousand charming tints by time and weather. Creepers bearing great yellow flower disks trail across it; trees shadow it, and the convent's massive outlines loom from behind. . . . A beautiful work is done inside in teaching Chinese girls the sweet decencies of life and pretty feminine arts. Opposite is my friend's house--two stories of stone surrounded by great verandas. The coolies run down a curving flight of steps and deposit us at the door.

These Hong Kong houses have admirable interiors. A lofty hall divides this one, terminating on a rear veranda, with a wide view of the precipitous white city, buried in verdure, sloping down to the flashing emerald of the bay, that is ringed with tawny hills. The hall is filled with more potted plants, and massive furniture of Indian ebony and marble. To the left is a great drawing-room, fifty feet long and eighteen high, with a dozen windows. Here are more palms and ferns, rich European fittings, and Eastern bric-…-brac. Scattered about are photographs of all the Hohenzollerns, for my friends are Germans. We rest awhile in the cool green gloom of this apartment, and drink tea brought by a tall yellow gentleman in silk trousers, a black satin cap, and a crisp rustling blue gown reaching nearly to his ankles. My bedchamber is another huge shadowy place, with a dressing-room and bath as large as the ordinary drawing-room at home, furnished with old mahogany and silver fittings brought from Germany two generations ago. Its airy, unencumbered spaces remind me of the fine old bedchambers in the plantation houses at home in the South. . . . Here I am awakened in the morning by another pigtailed gentleman, who brings me my tea, prepares my bath, and arranges all things ready for my toilet. Female servants in Hong Kong are rare; and after the first surprise is over these clean, grave male-maids seem perfectly efficient and convenable servitors. Our meals are stately functions--adorned, of course, with profuse greenery and flowers--with fine wines and delicate food exquisitely prepared. . . . A sumptuous Eastern life that flows on with cool and unhasting repose and gravity. I was never in a German household before, and find here many pretty unfamiliar customs--one of them a nice fashion of repeating upon rising from the table a German phrase which expresses mutual good-will and affection, a sort of grace of friendship after meat. There is a careful sweet civility too in their intercourse with one another, very pleasant to share.

. . . In all our expeditions about the place we are luxuriously carried by our coolies, who apparently put forth no special effort or haste, but with whom a rapid walker with no burden is unable to keep pace. The streets are a panorama of unending interest. 'Rikishas are employed occasionally in the level part of the town, but the general mode of travelling in the steeper streets is by chairs, the distinctive livery of private bearers consisting of the color of the border of their white garments. Stout, haughty, red-faced Englishmen go by in these chairs, and occasionally a covered one is met, with bamboo blinds, in which sits an equally fat and haughty mandarin. Coolies run about at a dog-trot bearing immense burdens swung at the two ends of a pole carried on their naked muscular yellow shoulders. Pretty round-faced children, dressed exactly like their elders, play in the doorways and exchange smiles with the passer-by. There is a general public amiability--without the gay and gracious vivacity of Japan--in all save the lowest class of laborers. These toil terribly and incessantly for infinitesimal sums, and by the most minute economies manage to exist--to continue these labors and privations. They are old in youth, parched, callous, and dully indifferent. Incapable of further disappointment, they exist with the stolid patience of those who expect only stones and serpents, having abandoned all hopes of bread and fish. 

. . . The town is growing and prosperous. The shops, hotels, clubs, and counting-houses are handsome stone buildings with deep arcade-like verandas surrounded by pointed arches. The banks and public buildings are imposing and massive, and the place is noisy with the sound of mason's tools. The harbor for 200 yards in front of the Praya (the broad water street) is shallow, and preparations are being made to fill it up and give Hong Kong the benefit of this extra width of level land. The same was done some years ago at Kow-Loon, on the opposite side of the harbor, where England owns a strip of the mainland. On this reclaimed land fine wharves lined with godowns (warehouses) have been built, and huge dry-docks and shipyards established where shipbuilding goes industriously on and the largest vessels afloat can put in for repairs. The export trade in cotton, tea, silk, spices, and rice is enormous, and the place develops year by year considerable manufacturing industries.

Though three great lines of trans-Pacific steamers ply between Hong Kong and America, there is only one resident of that nationality in the city besides the consul. The English, Germans, Parsees, and Chinamen conduct its business. The strategic importance of Hong Kong is so great that four or five war ships are always in its harbor or cruise in the neighborhood, and two full regiments are kept in garrison. At the time of my visit one of these regiments was of Highlanders who wear in this hot climate white jackets and helmets with their kilts. They are being put through a rapid and vigorous drill one morning when we pass the parade ground, and the pipes are shrilly skirling--music to stir the heart in which runs the smallest drop of Scotch blood. Not even the Sikh policemen stand first in my affections at this moment, as, to that wild keen sound, the solid ranks of brawny red-haired Caledonians trot by, with their petticoats fluttering about their bare knees and their bayonets set in a glittering hedge. . . . Oh, braw sight! . . . Oh, bonny lads! . . . Scotland forever! . . .

The climate of Hong Kong at this season is of Eden. Airs of Paradise wave through the splendid tropical foliage. The sun is pleasantly hot at midday, and the mornings and evenings are dewily cool. Coolies do their work naked to the waist, but ordinary European garments are comfortable. From every point is seen either the light flashing from green waters, or the red and yellow hills outlined against a turquoise sky. My friends are loath that I should lose a single pleasure, and we are out all day long in this adorable weather. One of our paths lies through the green twilight of the Botanical Gardens, filled with such vegetation as I have always regarded with a doubting eye in the picture of the Asiatic half of the geographies. We pass under the tremulous lacey shadows of ferns twenty feet high, through trellises weighted with ponderous vines that blow a myriad perfumed purple trumpets up to the golden noon, and emerge upon sunny spaces where fountains are sprinkling silver rain upon banks of crimson and orange flowers. The flaxen-haired, muslin-clad English children play here, cared for by prim trousered Chinese amahs; and we meet pretty blue-eyed German ladies in their chairs taking this road home.

Another expedition leads to the top of the peak, whose head is 2000 feet above the water and up whose sides the town climbs year by year. Our way--at an angle of forty-five degrees--is by a tram dragged up the mountain by means of an endless chain. This peak is the city's summer resort and pleasuring-ground. Handsome bungalows cling to its steep sides--built in the Italian style, of warm cream-white stone. There is ten degrees difference in temperature between the summit and the town, and a summer hotel is in process of construction at the top. . . . We can see from here how the water flows between the hills, and how the harbor broadens to bays and narrows to straits between the island mountains. Only at Rio Janeiro and Sydney, they tell me, is there a harbor whose beauty compares to this. The man in charge of the windy signal station comes out and explains to us the various ways in which the town is warned of the coming of vessels, and also introduces us to an extremely low-spirited and discontented-looking lady with battered features who turns her back on us and stares in unwinking disgust out to sea. She was once the gay and gilded figure-head of the Princess Charlotte, wrecked in these waters long since, and plainly resents what she looks upon as her fall in life, and the banal jocosity of those who rescued her--bobbing detachedly about in a sheltered cove--and brought her up here to assist a low signal officer! . . .

Our chairs have come up another way, and we are to be carried down the long winding road that sinks by slow stages to the town. During the first stage we are in full sunlight, passing under the walls of the white palace-like bungalows with smooth-shaven tennis-courts where ruddy-cheeked, spare-loined young Englishmen toss the bass to fair-haired, light-footed English girls. Then the road--the earth here is a thousand beautiful shades of buff and rose--winds about to the east, and we pass into the shadows. A tiny Greek church with a sparsely populated graveyard clings to the declivity above us, and from far below comes the faint cool sound of waters foaming round the foot of the hills.

. . . The sun has set; only the utmost heights are gilded now, and the twilight deepens on our path. We swing around the hills--in and out, and down, down, with smooth, easy motion--to the regular pad, pad, pad of the bearers' feet. Here and there in the dusk we discern the scarlet turbans of Sikh warders, standing motionless as bronze statues. Below in the harbor the lights of the town, the ships, and the flitting sampans sparkle through the faint evening mist like multitudinous fireflies. The town climbs the hill to meet us, and we pass into the still heavier gloom of trees. A great pure calm reigns where we sink into this cool flood of darkness; . . . half-naked figures go by noiselessly on unshod feet. . . . I know all this; I remember it well. . . . Somewhere--once--I passed through just such shadowy ways in the warm nights. . . . This silent peace of darkness after long hours of burning light is quite familiar to me. I try to recall where it was--but it was a long, long, time ago and I have forgotten the name of the place and the people who lived there. . . . I only remember that I used to pass under the great tree, . . . that some wonderful secret delight waited for me beyond them. Alas! That was very long ago; to night only an excellent dinner attends my coming. . . . "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree--"

Kubla Khan did come to tiffin one day--a handsome dark gentleman of forty years or so, with very white teeth and eyes like black velvet. He wore extremely well-fitting London clothes, and in his soft, slow voice he signified that on the morrow he would take us to see the pleasure dome--not yet entirely complete. . . . Kubla Khan was his name in Xanadu of course, but in Hong Kong, for the sake of convenience and brevity, he was called Catchik Chater. Also for convenience and brevity he gave it out that he was a British subject, resident in China, born in India, and with a certain mixture of Greek and American blood in his veins; naturally in Xanadu his rank and pedigree were far more complicated. . . . It had been his fancy to come to Hong Kong twenty years before, neglecting to bring with him any drafts on his treasury, and in the interim he had collected something like a million pounds it was said. It was he who had made the long water-front at Kow-Loon, rescuing it from the sea, and had covered it with great godowns filled with merchandise of the East, and it was he who was proposing the same feat on the opposite side of the harbor. He had interested himself more or less in the banks, the shipyards and manufactures of various sorts, and he now felt prepared to erect in China a repetition of the Xanadu pleasure dome. He took us first to see his docks and godowns, resounding with the loud clangors of trade, and then through the grassy Kow-Loon plains, by a wide red road shadowed with banana-trees, to this lordly pavilion set on the crest of many flowering terraces--its pale-yellow outlines cut cameo--like against the burning blue of the equatorial sky. To the right is the naked side of a hill all deep-tinted buff warmed with red, and everywhere else a sea of stain-leaved tropical foliage.

The centre of the pavilion is a great banqueting-hall with domed roof thirty feet above the tessellated pavement. The walls are frescoed in the same deep cream color of the exterior, touched here and there with blue and rose and gold. Twenty lofty arched doors give on the veranda, from whence beyond the roses of the terrace one sees the glitter of the green waters of the harbor. At each end of the banqueting-hall opens a drawing-room set with mirrors and lined with divans. Beneath are tiled bath-rooms, needed in this hot climate after using the tennis-courts and bowling-alleys. Here Kubla Khan's guests come--come by twenties and fifties--and feast splendidly on high days and holidays and on hot star-lit tropical nights. It is like the sumptuous fancy of some splendid Roman noble, pro-consul of an Eastern province. The pavilion for the moment is in the hands of workmen, so we may not dine there; but we do dine with the Khan in his town house, eating through many courses, drinking many costly wines, and served by a phalanx of tall Celestials in rustling blue gowns.

Another day we go to the shops and turn over costly examples of Chinese art--coming home through the many-colored ways of the native town;--steep streets that climb laboriously up and down stairs, and so narrow that there is hardly room for our chairs to pass through the multitudes who swarm there. Sixteen hundred residents to the acre they average in this part of the town, buzzing and humming like the unreckonable myriads insects breed from the fecund slime of a marsh. Two thirds of their life is passed out of doors in the streets, and all seem to be patiently and continuously busy. Children are as the flies in number and activity. The place smells violently; smells of opium, of the dried ducks and fish hanging exposed for sale in the sun, of frying pork and sausages, and of the many strange repulsive-looking meals being cooked on hissing braziers in the streets and in door-ways. There is no lack of color. The shops are faced with a broad fretwork richly gilded, and the long perpendicular signs are ornamentally lettered with large black characters. Every house is lime-washed some strong tint, and the whole leaves upon the eye the color-impression one gets from Chinese porcelains--of sharp green, gold, crimson, and blue; all vigorous, definite, and mingled with grotesque tastefulness.

My plan had been to sail from Hong Kong on the Norddeutscher- Lloyd ship Preussen, but a Peninsular and Oriental steamer sails three days earlier; I am advised to go in her as far as Ceylon, and I do. So on the morning of the 18th of December I find myself on the deck of the Thames, surrounded by the charming friends and acquaintances of this Hong Kong episode, who have come to give me a final proof of their goodness, and wish me speed on my journey.

This boat is as polyglot as the land I have just left, and swarms with queer people. The sailors are Lascars, clad in close trousers and tunic of blue cotton check and red turbans. Many of the Parsees in their purple coal-hods come aboard to bid farewell to a parting friend. One of the Highlanders is going home and his comrades have brought the pipes to give him a last tune. Grief and Scotch whiskey move them finally to "play a spring and dance it round" in spite of the heat, which brings the sweat pouring down their faces. Sampans cluster about with pretty little Chinese dogs, bamboo steamer chairs, and canary birds for sale, driving a few final bargains.

. . . The bell warns them all away. I wave good-bye to my friends and to the beautiful city with the keenest regret.

. . . The fifth stage of my journey has begun under the shadow of the Union Jack.

FIFTH STAGE

Hong Kong vanishes in a haze of sunlight. I am desperately tired--worn out with delights. My head swims with a glorious confusion of tropic splendors, and there is no room or capacity in it for more impressions just now. I will go below.

 . . . It is a beautiful ship; like a fine yacht in its spacious commodiousness. Here and there hang canary cages thrilling with song. Narcissus bulbs in bowls are ablow with fluttering white flowers, and everywhere are deep-colored jars full of palms and ferns. The space assigned to me is a large, pleasant white room, from which a great square lifts up outward on the water-side, leaving me on intimate terms with the milky, jade-tinted sea. Beneath this window is a broad divan, and here, laved in tepid sea winds and soothed by rippling whispers against the ship's side, I sleep--the langorous, voluptuous sleep of the tropics; . . . sink softly into that dim warm flood where one lies drenched, submerged in unconsciousness; a flood that ebbs slowly, slowly--bearing with it all fatigue and satiety--and leaves me on the shores of life again in a pale lilac dusk glimmering with great stars. . . .

Yea, verily, life is good in this magnificent equatorial world! Again I am a great sponge, absorbing beauty and delight with every pore. Every day brings new marvels and new joys. I go to bed exhaustedly happy and wake up expectantly smiling. Everything pleases, everything amuses me; most of all perhaps the strong British atmosphere in which one finds one's self on board a P. and O. steamer. I am--with the exception of a charming little old lady from Boston, who after two years of travel in the East has suffered no diminution of her respect for the Common and Phillips Brooks--the only woman on the passenger list; so the British atmosphere has a pronounced masculine flavor; but despite even this limitation it is interesting.

The men, from captain to cook, are fine creatures. Their physical vigor is superb--such muscles! such crisply curled hair! such clear ruddy skins, white teeth, and turquoise eyes. They are flat-backed and lean-loined; they carry their huge shoulders with a lordly swagger; they possess a divine faith in themselves and in England; and they have such an astonishing collection of accents! No two of them speak alike: the burly bearded giant three places off from me at table speaks with a broad Scotch drawl; the handsome, natty little fourth officer with the black eyes and shy red face who sits opposite, in white duck from head to heel, has a bit of a Yorkshire burr on the tip of his tongue; the Ceylon tea-planter talks like a New-Yorker, and there are fully a dozen variations more between his accent and that of the tall young blond, whose fashionable Eton and Oxford inflections leave one speechless with awe and admiration of their magnificent eccentricities.

Even the menu is of daily interest, for here I become for the first time familiar with food upon which the folk of the English novels are fed. I learn to know and appreciate the Bath bun and the Scotch scone. I make the greatly-to-be-prized acquaintance of the English meat pie, including Mr. Weller's favorite "weal and 'ammer," and I recognize touching manifestations of British loyalty in the sweets christened impartially with appellations of royalty: Victoria jelly-roll, Alexandra wafers, and Beatrice tarts. Waterloo pudding is one of our favorite desserts, and other British triumphs and glories adorn the bill of fare from time to time.

. . . Sunday the Lascar crew, who have contented themselves all the week with garments of blue cotton check and red turbans, suddenly bloom and burgeon garden-wise. We are lounging in our bamboo chairs on the wide decks; the awning flutters lazily in the breeze; and we, swimming between two worlds of burning blue, are endeavoring by supreme indolence to recover from the fatigues of morning service, when this startlingly variegated vision bursts upon us: All the brown feet are bare, but the brown nether limbs are clad airily in Swiss muslin trousers, over which falls to the knee a tunic of the same material striped with fine lines of gold, silver, or scarlet thread and girdled with a vivid-hued sash, this again partly covered with a loose silk waistcoat--pink, green, or blue--glittering with spangles. Brimless hats of red and yellow straw, like inverted flat-bottomed baskets, are wrapped with many scarlet folds, and the boatswains add one more touch of splendor in their great wrought-silver buttons and yards of silver chain, from which hangs suspended the whistle of their office. I am at first inclined to suspect them of having looted the wardrobe of an odalisque, but am assured it is only the muster for the usual Sunday-morning inspection and their accustomed costume for such occasions. A brief but imposing ceremony, this. The officers exchange their white jackets for blue coats. The doctor solemnly confers with the captain, and those in imperfect hygienic condition stand on one foot in apologetic embarrassment, as they catch the piercing and reproachful glance of their commander, who passes ceremoniously down the line accompanied by the entire staff, acknowledging with condescending salute the row of brown hands lifted to the brown brows.

The boatswain sounds his whistle, the ranks are broken, and the affair is over.

Every one goes and gets something to drink as a freshener after so much excitement and the officers change back into white jackets.

As the little fawn-eyed punkah-wallah (to put it in American, the boy who pulls the hanging fan over the table) passes me, I snatch off his turban and find his round brown head shaved smooth as my palm, except for the one lock over the brow by which Mahomet is to catch him up to heaven. He finds this liberty only an amusing condescension on my part, and smiles indulgently and shyly, following me about always afterwards with little mute services and attentions--so sweet-natured are these Eastern folk. We sail through the blue days on a level keel. The sea does not even breathe; but it quivers in the terrible splendors of the noon with undreamable peacock radiances. 

. . . The sky arches to a dome of intolerable vastness, filled with a blinding light. Hardly can its glories be borne, even in the shadow of the wide awning where one lies half the day in Indian lounging-chairs, warmed to the very heart and soaked through and through with color and light.

. . . There are no pageants of sunsets. The burning ball, undimmed by any cloud, falls swiftly and is quenched in the ocean, and after an instant of crepuscular violet the prodigious tide of light vanishes abruptly, like some vast conflagration blown out suddenly, and as suddenly succeeded by

"The night of ebon blackness, 
Laced with lustres of starry clusters."

Then the constellations hang in the awful vault of darkness like enormous gleaming lamps trembling in suspension. And from the swart deep beneath whirl up myriads of great ghostly jewels, glittering with unearthly fires and trailing a broad waving path of spectral silver along the black waters in our wake. 

. . . Every hour brings us nearer the equator, and on the morning of the 23d of December we sight Singapore, seventy miles only from the centre of heat. The waters of the harbor are curiously banded in broad lines of brilliant violet, green, and blue, each quite distinct and with no fusions of color. Against the sky line everywhere are the feathery heads of palms, and the tremendous riot of verdure upon all the hills is of a vivid, dazzling green. The vegetation is enormous, rampant, violent. . . . It stands round about the place like an army with banners, ready to rush in at any breach and destroy. It contests every inch of space with man, and, aided by incessant heat and moisture, constantly wrests from him his conquests and buries them in a fury of viridescence. Seven hundred years has this City of the Lions stood, but the never-ending battle with tropic nature's lust for disintegration has left it with no monuments of its great age, no venerable buildings to testify to its antiquity. In the twelfth century Singapore was the capital of the Malayan empire, but in 1824 the British purchased it from the sultan of Jahore, scarcely more than a heap of ruins.

Only those who travel to these Eastern ports can form any adequate conception of the ability which has directed English conquest in the Orient. When they bullied the Malayan sultan into selling Singapore, they were apparently acquiring a ruinous and unimportant territory. To-day this port is the entrep“rt of Asian commerce, a coaling station for vessels of all countries, a deep, safe harbor for England's own ships and men-of-war, and a point from which she can command both seas. The inhabitants of her Straits Settlements number considerably more than half a million, and the exports and imports are each in value something like œ10,000,000 yearly. The United States alone buys there every twelvemonth goods worth more than $4,000,000.

. . . It is very hot. The tall blonde, who is grandson of one of the world-famous conquerors of the East, arrays himself in snowy silk and linen and dons a Terrai hat with a floating scarf; but even in this attire moisture sparkles on his rosy skin, and his yellow curls cling damply to his brow. The Ceylon tea-planter, twenty years resident in the tropics, is garbed in the ordinary costume of civilization, and apparently suffers no discomfort. Accompanied by these two and the lady from Boston, I go ashore.

Queer little square carriages, made for the most part of Venetian blinds, wait for us, drawn by disconsolate ponies the size of sheep. Conveyance in the East is a constant source of unhappiness to me. I was deprecatory with the jinrikisha men in Japan, I humbled myself before the chair-bearers of Hong Kong, and now I go and make an elaborate apology to this wretched little beast before I can reconcile it to my conscience to climb into the gharry, or let him drag me about at a gallop.

The earth beneath us is a deep red, the trees are brightly green; to the right lies a rainbow sea, and overhead a sky of burning blue. The town is every color--blinding white, azure, green, red, yellow; the houses heavy squares of lime-washed brick, mostly without windows. Interiors are gloomily cool, and more than enough of the huge fierce glare of day enters through the open door. We pass swiftly through the business part of the town, and beyond to the broad red water-road where the houses face the sea.

One is suddenly aware that the sensory nerves awake in this heat to marvellous acuteness. The eye seems to expand its iris to great size and be capable of receiving undreamed possibilities of luminosity and hue. The skin grows exquisitely sensitive to the slightest touch--the faintest movement of the air. Numberless fine under-currents of sound reach the ear, and the sense of smell is so strong that the perfumes of fruit and flowers at a great distance are penetrating as if held in the hand. One smells everything: . . . delicious hot scents of vegetation, . . . the steaming of the earth, . . . and the faint acrid odors of the many sweating bodies of workers in the sun. . . .

The water-road is full of folk Tall Hindoos go by leading little cream-white bulls with humped necks, who drag rude carts full of merchandise or fruits-pineapples, mangoes, and cocoanuts. English officials spin past in dog-carts with bare-footed muslin-clad grooms up behind, and wealthy unctuous Chinese merchants bowl about in 'rikishas. Nearly all foot-passengers are half or three-quarters naked. It is an open-air museum of superb bronzes, who, when they condescend to clothe themselves at all, drape in statuesque folds about their brown limbs and bodies a few yards of white or crimson cloth, which adorns rather than conceals. One gasps for breath as there suddenly emerges from a side street what appears to be a fat old lady coming from the bath, her gray hair knotted up carelessly and a towel as her only costume. In reality there is no cause for alarm; it is a dignified elderly Malay merchant in conventional business attire. Every one has long hair and wears it twisted up at the nape of the neck; this, with the absence of beards and the general indeterminateness of attire, makes it difficult to distinguish sexes. The lower class of work people are black, shining, and polished as Indian idols. At work they wear only a breechcloth, but when evening comes they catch up a square of creamy transparent stuff, and by a twist or two of the wrist fold it beautifully and loosely about themselves, and with erect heads tread silently away through the dusk-slender, proud, and mysterious-eyed. The Malays are of an exquisite bronze, gleaming in the sun like burnished gold. They have full silken inky hair, very white teeth, and dress much in draperies of dull-red cotton, which makes them objects delicious to contemplate. Mingled with all these is the ubiquitous Chinaman in a pair of short loose blue breeches, his handsome muscular body shining as yellow satin.

We reach the hotel at last, its gloom, its cloistered arcades and great dark rooms pleasant enough as a refuge from the sun. The dining-room, a great vaulted hall through the centre of the building, is level with the earth, paved with stone and without doors, opening upon the veranda through three archways. Without windows, one can scarcely distinguish anything at first entrance from the glare outside; but presently we find the place full of tables of green and growing plants, and two huge punkahs waving slowly overhead, making a cooling breeze. We are served by Hindoos in garments and turbans of white muslin, who have slender melancholy brown faces, and eyes that shine through wonderful lashes with the soft gleamings of black jewels. I can scarcely eat my tiffin for delight in the enchanting pathetic beauty, the passionate grace and sadness, of the face of the lad who brings me butter in a lordly dish, the yellow rolls laid upon banana leaves, and serves me curry with a spoon made of a big pink shell.

Every one is in lily white from head to heel, like a bride or a d‚butante--white duck trousers and fatigue jacket, white helmet, and white shoes.

This is the dress of two young subalterns with heads like canary birds, and the sappy red of English beef still in their cheeks, just out from home for their first experience of Eastern service. They are full of energy, interest, and enthusiasm; they order beer and beef, and mop their hot faces from time to time, listening meanwhile with profound respect to the words of their superior officer, who condescends to tiffin with them and to give them good advice. His dress is similar to theirs, save for the gold straps on his shoulders, but all the succulent English flesh has been burned off of him long ago, and left him lean, tawdry, and dry He quenches his thirst with a little iced brandy and soda, eats sparingly of curry and fruit, and seems not to feel the heat much He has no enthusiasms, he has no interests except duty and the service, and he does not think any brown or yellow person in the least pretty or pleasant. His advice to the youngsters, while valuable, is saturninely patronizing and full of disillusionment, and one can see it falls somewhat coldly upon their youthful ardor.

. . . Mine is a huge dim apartment with a stone floor opening directly upon the lawn and into the dining-room, and has only slight jalousies for doors; but no one peers or intrudes. The bed is an iron frame; the single hard mattress is spread with a sheet, and there are no covers at all. Even the pillow is of straw. My bath-room, a lofty flagged chamber, opens into this one, and contains a big earthenware jar which the coolies fill for me three times a day, and into which I plunge to rid me of the burning heat.

. . . That night I have the most terrible adventure. Immediately I get into bed and blow out the candle, I hear what sounds like some great animal stalking about. I am cold enough now--icy, in fact. . . . What can it be? . . .

They tell me tigers come over from the mainland and carry off an average one person a day. . . . This is probably a tiger. He could easily push open those blind doors and walk in! . . . He is coming towards the bed with heavy stealthy rustlings. There is not even a sheet to draw up over me. The room is hot, utterly black and still, save for the sound of those feet and the loud banging of my heart against my ribs. . . . The hotel seems to be dead, so horribly s