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E had left Hong-Kong enveloped in its usual spring fog, and for five long, weary days had steamed across the China Sea in regular monsoon weather, gray and wet and miserable, but during the fifth some rocky islands, outlying sentinels of the three thousand which compose the Mikado’s realm, and occasional square-sailed, high-sterned boats, showed that we were near Japan, the Far East, the Land of Flowers and of the Rising Sun, the country which for years it had been my dream to see and paint; and by six o’clock in the evening, on the 9th of March, we were at anchor in Nagasaki Bay. The aspect of that port on a wet day was not inviting, nor were the little grimy girls, who in a chattering, laughing line carried their baskets of coal on board; so, difficult as it was to decline the hospitable invitations of the English residents, I decided to go on with the ship to Kōbe. Early in the morning of the 11th we passed through the Strait of Shimonoseki—the sun shining brightly on the snowy hills and on the crowd of fishing-boats which had been sheltering there from the bad weather—and entered the Inland Sea. After so many days of monotonous gray ocean it was delightful to steam along in sight of land, and wind about among the islets and rocks, so near to many of them that we could see the little villages, the mists of white plum blossoms, the rows of beans and barley growing wherever a level patch could be made on the steep slopes, the people at work in their