road stands high and dry above the bed of the river large slices have been cut away by the rushing tide. This must have happened not later than July. But gaps still stand, making the road impassable for horse or bullock traffic. The jinrikishas can just get past in some places by making a détour, in others profiting by a perilous ridge of roadway that has remained. With the exception of these accidents the road is a good one.

We slept at Tagawa, a pretty hamlet nestling at the foot of a hill. The hills here are very curious, being perfectly bare, brown or red sandstone rocks standing up out of the greenery. They are thoroughly Japanese, of the coolie class, seeming to have got up in the morning and gone out without putting on any superfluous clothing. In the early morning we toiled through the steep pass that winds its way through the hills, and descending at a rapid trot reached Otsu, where we had tiffin within view of Lake Beva. Here we found train for Kioto, and gladly took it, for it had been raining all the morning, and the slow process of drying Ito's clothes had been disastrously interrupted.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CAPITAL OF THE MIKADOS.

Of all the towns in Japan accessible to the foreigner Kioto is by far the most interesting. Compared with it, in point of years, Tokio is but a stripling, and Yokohama a puny infant. When, in 1590, Tokio (then known as Yedo) was made the capital of Eastern Japan, Kioto had been miyako, or residence of the sovereign, for eight hundred years. This farreaching antiquity is modified by the fact that Kioto has many times received the baptism of fire. Like all Japanese towns, it has been burnt several times, and what the fire has not destroyed at one time it has attacked at another. The palace itself has been destroyed by fire six times within the last one hundred and eighty years. As for the city, so recently as 1864 it was half burnt, as an episode in the Civil War. Nevertheless, it preserves in unmistakable manner its old-time look. It lies

in a valley, with a chain of hills almost encircling it. Through its midst flows the Kanagawa, after the summer rains a noble river, but in November, when I saw it, a streamlet trickling through a wide bed of pebbles, apparently in imminent danger of losing its way.

There is no European quarter in Kioto, and, judging from the behaviour of the natives, I should say that the average of Europeans finding their way thither in the course of a year is small. We did a good deal of miscellaneous shopping, and wherever we went there assembled a crowd of people, of all ages and both sexes. They were very quiet and not intentionally rude, but their capacity for a prolonged steady stare is infinite. What they saw did not—at least, not immediately— suggest interchange of remark. They did not whisper or point with finger. They just stood and dumbly stared, watching every slightest motion or gesture of the strange beings who had dropped from Heaven knows where upon the streets of their city.

On the night of our arrival we went to a barber's shop for a shave, necessary after four days' travel. As our jinrikishas drew up the crowd began to gather, and when it was discovered that two Englishmen were actually

about to be shaved, the excitement throughout the quarter deepened in intensity. The crowd blocked up the narrow street, those behind trying to see over the heads of others in front, whilst the thrice-fortunate ones in the first line flattened their noses against the window and steamed it with their breath.

Inside the shop there was a reflex of the excitement. The barber himself, though pale, was collected in manner, and gave me only one gash. But his whole family were ranged in a group in the kitchen, which opened into the shop. The assistants stood around, from time to time handing unnecessary articles to the operator. The most hopeless case was the small boy, whose duty it was to stand by and hand paper, combs, brush, towel, or whatever might be needed by the barber. He stood at the elbow of the chair whilst I was being shaved, with his face half a foot from mine, his lips slightly parted, and a pair of great brown eyes unnaturally extended fixed on my face. I fancy he was in a condition of modified catalepsy. At any rate, he neither moved nor spoke whilst the barber rasped me, and when I vacated the chair in favour of the young gentleman from Glasgow he began afresh on him.

It was the most villainous shave I ever

suffered. A dinner-knife would have been for the purpose a luxurious article compared with the razor. I besought the barber to let me off, but without avail. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he would not limit its duration by any voluntary act. We had brought Ito with us, a necessary precaution; otherwise before we could have made our protest understood we might have had a few bald places artistically arranged on our heads, and perhaps our eyebrows shaved off in the manner of the Japanese.

After much haranguing, Ito induced the man to let me go, to the manifest disappointment of the crowd, who were consoled only by seeing the young gentleman from Glasgow take the chair. Finally the barber charged one and eightpence for his fiendish work, which, considering we had left the United States, seemed dear for a shave. The price to a native would have been twopence halfpenny at most, and he would, in addition, have had his ears and nostrils shaved and his hair brushed and oiled. This was noticeable as the only attempt to charge extra to a foreigner which came under my personal notice in Japan.

The streets of Kioto are not quite so densely crowded as those of Tokio, but there is about them the same air of good-humoured