“Set me down at the Sailors’ Home,” I ordered, stepping into the first ’rickshah to reach me.

“No good,” answered the runner, dropping the shafts. “Sailor Home he close.”

“We’ll go and see,” I replied, knowing the ways of ’rickshah-men.

But the Home was unoccupied, sure enough, and its windows boarded up. The runner assumed the attitude of a man who had been insulted without reason.

“Me know ver’ fine hotel,” he said, haughtily, “Many white sailor man stop. Me takee there. Ver’ fine.”

I acquiesced, and he jogged out along the strand driveway and halfway round the sparkling harbor. Near the top of one of the ridges on which Nagasaki is built he halted at the foot of a flight of stone steps cut in a hillside.

“Hotel topside,” he panted, pointing upward.

In the perfumed grove at the summit stood a house so frail and dainty that it seemed a toy dwelling. Its courtyard was gay with nodding flowers, about the veranda posts twined red-blossomed vines. In the doorway stood a Japanese woman, buxom, yet pretty. Though her English was halting, her welcome was most cordial. She led the way to a quaintly decorated chamber, arranged cushions, and bade me sit down. I laid aside my bundle and gazed out across the panorama of the harbor, delicate in coloring; a scene rarely equaled in any clime. Fortunate, indeed, had I been to find so charming a lodging.

A panel moved noiselessly aside. The proprietress again slipped into the room and clapped her hands thrice. Behind her sounded a choral whisper, and six girls, lustrous of coiffure, clad in gaily flowered kimonas, glided towards me with so silent a tread that they seemed to float through the air. All were in the first bloom of youth, as dainty of face and form as they were graceful of movement. Twice they circled around me, ever drawing nearer, then, halting a few feet away, they dropped to their knees, touched their foreheads 463to the floor, and sat up smiling. The landlady, standing erect, gazed down upon me.

“Sailor man, how you like?” she purred, “Ver’ nice?”

“Yes, very nice,” I echoed.

“Well, take which one you like and get married,” she continued.

The ’rickshah-man, alas, knew the ways of sailors but too well. I picked up my bundle and, glancing regretfully down upon the harbor, stepped out on the veranda.

“What!” cried the matron, following after me, “You not like get married? Ver’ nice room, ver’ good chow, ver’ nice wife, fifteen yen one week.”

I crossed the flowery courtyard towards the stone stairway.

“You no like?” called the landlady, “Ver’ sorry. Good-bye.”

Beside a canal down near the harbor I found a less luxurious hotel. The proprietor, awakened from a doze among the bottles and decanters of the bar-room, gurgled a thick-voiced welcome. He was an American, a wanderer since boyhood, for some years domiciled in Nagasaki. The real manager of the hotel was his Japanese wife, a sprightly matron whose farsighted business acumen was evidenced by a stringent rule she had laid down forbidding her besotted spouse entrance, except at meal hours, to any other section of the hostelry than the bar-room. Most interesting of the household were the offspring of this pair, a boy and girl of twelve and ten. In them were combined the best qualities of the parent races. No American children could have been quicker of wit nor more whole-heartedly diligent at work or play; no Japanese more open to impression nor more inherently polite of demeanor. Already the father was accustomed to refer to his son problems too complicated for his own unresponsive intellect; the mother left to her daughter the details of flower-plot and wardrobe.

Lodged in an airy chamber, I could have slept late next morning had I not been awakened at daybreak by what seemed to be a rapid succession of revolver shots. I sprang to the window, half fearing that the proprietor was assassinating his wife in a drunken frenzy. In the yard below squatted the half-breed children, with a stick of “punk” and a great bundle of fire-crackers. I had forgotten the date. It was the Fourth, and Nagasaki was celebrating. All through the day bombilations sounded at regular intervals about the city; nor was the racket instigated entirely by American residents.

Ordinarily the boy and girl of the hotel dressed exactly like their 464playmates and no sooner turned their backs on their father than they lapsed at once into the native tongue. But on this American day the boy wore a knickerbocker suit and leather shoes; his sister had laid aside her kimona and wooden sandals to don a short frock and long stockings. Instead of the intricate coiffure of the day before, her jet-black hair hung in two braids over her shoulders; and not once during all that festal day did a word of Japanese pass between them.

Two days later, garbed in an American khaki uniform chosen from the stock of a pawnbroker popular with soldiers returning from the Philippines, I sought out the railway station and took third-class passage for Hiroshima. Two policemen blocked my entrance to the platform, and, in spite of my protest that my history was recorded in full on the hotel register, they filled several pages of their notebooks with an account of my doings. For the war with Russia was at its height and a strict watch was kept on all white men within the empire.

The train wound off through a rolling, sylvan country, here circling the base of a thickly-wooded hill, there clinging close to the shore of a sparkling bay. Not an acre capable of production was untilled. Peasants toiled in every valley, on every hillside; their neat cottages dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see. Populous, wide-awake villages succeeded each other rapidly. The stations were well-equipped buildings bearing both in Japanese and English the name of the town they served. In his eagerness to imitate the western world the Jap has adopted one custom which might better have been passed over. The gorgeous landscape was half hidden at times by huge unsightly signboards bellowing forth the alleged virtues of every conceivable ware.

The coaches were built on the American plan, and every carriage was a smoking-car; for the use of tobacco is well-nigh universal in Japan among both sexes. Barely had a lady folded her legs under her on a bench across the aisle than she drew out a pipe in appearance like a long lead pencil, the bowl of which held much less than the smallest thimble, and a leather pouch containing tobacco as fine as the hair of the head. The pipe lighted, she took one long pull at it, knocked out the residue on the back of the seat before her, refilled the bowl, exhaled from her lungs the first puff, and, turning the pipe upside down, lighted it again from the glowing embers of the first filling. The pipe held only enough for one puff; the smoker filled it a score of times before she was satisfied, always keeping the smoke in her lungs until the bowl was refilled, and using a match only for the first lighting. Dining-cars were there none. At nearly every station boxes containing a goodly supply of rice, several boiled and pickled vegetables, one baked fish, and a pair of chopsticks only half split in two, were sold on the platform. The contents were always the same; the price fixed and surprisingly low.

A swimming-school of Japan, teachers on the bank, novices near the shore, and advanced students in white head-dress, well out in the pool

Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan

465I had not taken care to choose a through-train to Hiroshima. Not long after nightfall the one on which I was traveling reached its terminal, a town named Hakata, and left me to spend the night in the waiting-room. Before I had fallen asleep a band of youths employed about the station began a series of tricks that kept me wide-awake until morning. They threw vegetables and rotten fruit at me through the windows; they pushed open the door to roll tin cans across the floor; if I fell into a doze they sneaked inside to deluge me with water or drag me off my wooden couch. Much we hear of the annoyances to which the kindly Japanese residents on our Pacific slope are subjected; yet no band of San Francisco hoodlums could have outdone these youths in concocting schemes to make life miserable for a foreigner in their midst.

Two hours’ ride from Hakata brought me to Moji and the ferry that connects the southern island with the largest of the kingdom. Policemen halted me on both sides of the strait and twice I was compelled to dictate the history of my past. From Shimonesaki the railway skirted the shore of the Inland Sea, passing the military hospital of Itsukaishi, where hundreds of convalescing soldiers, attired in flowing white kimonas with a great red cross on their breasts, strolled and lolled in the surrounding groves.

I descended in the twilight at Hiroshima in company with two English-speaking youths who had taken upon themselves the task of finding me a lodging. The proprietor of a hotel not far from the station acknowledged that he had never housed a white man, but begged for permission to show his versatility. I bade my new acquaintances farewell. The hotel office was a sort of patio, paved with small stones, from which a broad stairway with quaintly carved balustrade led upward. Mine host shouted a word of command. A smiling matron, short of stature, her inclination to embonpoint rendered doubly conspicuous by the ample oba wound round and round her waist, appeared on the landing above and beckoned to me to ascend. I caught up my bundle; but before I had mounted two steps the proprietor sprang forward with a scream and, clutching at my coat-tails, dragged 466me back. A half-dozen servant girls tumbled wild-eyed into the patio and joined the landlord in heaping abuse upon me. I had dared to start up the stairway without removing my shoes! The sight of a guest at a Fifth-avenue hotel jumping into bed fully clad could not have aroused such an uproar.

I pulled off the offending brogans; the keeper added them to a long line of wooden sandals ranged along the wall; and the matron conducted me to a small chamber with a balcony opening on the street. Everything about the apartment added to the feeling that I was a giant among Lilliputians; the ceiling, gay with gorgeously tinted dragons, was so low, the walls mere sliding panels of half-transparent paper stamped with flowers and strange figures, the highly-polished floor so frail that it yielded under every step. With a flying start a man could have run straight through the house and left it a wreck behind.

The room was entirely unfurnished. The hostess placed a cushion for me in the center of the floor and clapped her hands. A servant girl slipped in, bearing a tray on which was a tiny box of live coals, several cigarettes, a joint of bamboo standing upright, and a pot of tea with cup and saucer. Having deposited her burden at my feet, and touched her forehead to the floor, the maid handed me a cigarette, poured out tea, and remained kneeling a full half-hour, filling the tiny cup as often as I emptied it. When she was gone I picked up the joint of bamboo, fancying it contained sweetmeats or tobacco. It was empty, however, and I was left to wonder until the hostess returned. When she had understood my gestures she began a wordy explanation; but I shook my head. With a grimace that was evidently meant to be an apology, she caught up the hollow joint and spat into it. The thing was merely a Japanese spittoon.

A maid soon served supper. She brought first of all a table some eight inches high, then a great wooden bucket brimming full of hard-packed rice, and lastly, several little papier-maché bowls. One held a greasy liquid in which floated the yolk of an egg, another a small, soggy turnip, a third a sample of some native salad, at the bottom of the fourth lay in dreary isolation a pathetic little minnow. Of rice there was sufficient for a squad of soldiers; but without it the meal could not have satisfied a hungry canary.

Horses are rare in Japan. Men and baggage are drawn by coolies

Japanese children playing in the streets of Kioto

As I ate, the girl poured out tea in a cup that held a single swallow. Fortunately, I had already served my apprenticeship in the use of chopsticks, or I should have been forced to revert to the primitive 467table manners of the Hindu. As it was, it required great dexterity to possess myself of the swimming yolk; and he who fancies it is easy to balance a satisfying mouthful of rice on the ends of two slivers has only to try it to be disillusioned.

The meal over, I descended for a stroll through the town. The host brought my shoes, grinning sympathetically at the weight thereof, and I stepped out to mingle with the passing throng. There is nothing more inimitable than the voice of the street in Japan. He who has once heard it could never mistake it for another. There is no rumble of traffic to tire the senses, no jangle of tramways to inflict the ear. Horses are almost as rare as in Venice, and the rubber-tired ’rickshah behind a grass-shod runner passes as silently as a winged creature. The rank and file, however, are content to go on foot, and the scrape, scrape, scrape of wooden clogs sounds an incessant trebled note that may be heard in no other land.

There are Oriental cities in which the stranger would hesitate to wander after nightfall; in this well-ordered land he feels instinctively that he is running less risk of disagreeable encounter than in any metropolis of our own country. Class and mass mingle in the multitude; evil and brutal faces pass here and there; the European is sometimes subjected to the annoyance of unseemly curiosity, he may even be roughly jostled now and then; for the politeness of the Jap is individual, never collective. But rarely does the sound of brawling rise above the peaceful falsetto of scraping clogs.

I returned to the hotel fancying I was doomed to sleep on the polished floor; but the matron, apprised of my arrival, glided in and inquired, by the cosmopolitan pantomime of resting her cocked head in the palm of her hand, if I was ready to retire. I nodded, and at her signal a servant appeared with a quilt of great thickness, which she spread in the center of the floor. To an uncritical wanderer this seemed of itself a soft enough resting place, but not until six pudding-like counterpanes had been piled one on top of the other was the landlady content. Over this couch, that had taken on the form of a huge layer-cake, the pair spread a coverlet—there were no sheets—and backed out of the room. I rose to disrobe, but before I had touched a button they were back again, this time dragging behind them a great net, stout enough in texture to have held Paul’s draught of fishes. Disentangled, the thing proved to be canopy-shaped. While the matron attached the four corners of the top to hooks in the ceiling, the maid tucked the edges in under the stack of quilts.

468I was not averse to retiring at once, but at that moment there arrived a cotton-clad youth who announced himself as a police interpreter. Official Hiroshima was anxious to know more of the Americajín whose arrival had been reported by the station guards. The youth drew forth a legal form and read, in a sing-song voice, questions covering every period of my existence since squalling infancy. Between each the pause was long, for the interpreter must repeat each answer to the open-mouthed females kneeling beside us and set it down in the muscular native script. I passed a yawning half-hour before he was finished, and another before he ended a smoke-choked oration on the joy which my coming had awakened in the hearts of his fellow officers. Ere he departed he found opportunity to inquire into my plans for the future. I announced my intention of continuing eastward in the morning.

“You must go so fastly?” he queried, with grief-stricken countenance. “Then you shall go on the ten o’clock train; there is no other but very late.”

I had no notion of leaving Hiroshima on any train, but, considering my plans no affair of his, I held my peace. He departed at last and a moment later I was sorry I could not call him back long enough to interpret my orders to the matron and her maid. The pair refused to leave the room. When I pointed at the door they waved their hands towards the bed in a gesture that said I was at liberty to disrobe and turn in. But neither rose from her knees. I tried more energetic pantomime. The matron certainly understood, for she dismissed the servant; but refused herself to withdraw. I began to unbutton my jacket, hoping the suggestion would prove effective. She sighed audibly and settled down on her heels. I sat down on my cushion and lighted a cigarette, determined to smoke her out. She drew out a tobacco pouch and a pipe, picked the cigarette out of my fingers to light the first filling, and blew clouds of smoke at the ceiling.

Perhaps she was waiting to tuck me in when once I was abed. The notion seemed ludicrous; yet that was exactly for what she was waiting. With much shouting I prevailed upon her at last—not to leave the room, but to turn her back to me. Slipping off my outer garments, I crawled under the net and drew the coverlet over me. The matron rose gravely to her feet and marched twice round my couch, tucking in a quilt corner here, fastening a fold of the kaya there. Then, closing the panels on every side, she picked up the lamp and departed.

469The room soon grew stuffy. I crawled out to push back one of the panels opening on the veranda. Barely had I regained my couch, however, when a trembling of the floor announced approaching footsteps and that irrepressible female appeared on the balcony, silhouetted against the starlit sky. Calling out something I did not understand—fortunately perhaps—she pushed the panel shut again. I am accustomed to sleep with wide open windows; but it was useless to contend against fate. My guardian angel of the embonpoint knew that the only safe sleeping chamber was a tightly-closed room; and in such I spent the night.

Rarely have I experienced a stranger sensation than at the moment of awakening in that hotel of Hiroshima. It was broad daylight. The sun was streaming in across the balcony, and the incessant scraping of clogs sounded from the street below. But the room in which I had gone to bed had entirely disappeared! I sat up with bulging eyes. Under me was the stack of quilts, but all else was changed. The net was gone and I sat alone and deserted in the center of a hall as large as a dancing pavilion, the front of which for its entire length opened on the public street. The transformation was no magician’s trick, though it was several moments before I had sufficiently recovered to admit it. The servant girls had merely pushed together the panels.

For all the sinuosities of her streets and my ignorance of the Japanese tongue I had no great difficulty in picking up the highway out of Hiroshima. A half-century ago it would have been more dangerous to wander unarmed through rural Japan than in China. To-day the pedestrian runs no more risk than in England. There is a suggestion of the British Isles, too, in the open country of the Island Kingdom. Just such splendidly constructed highways stretch away between bright green hedge rows. Populous villages appear in rapid succession; the intervening territory, thickly settled and fertile, shows the hand of the industrious husbandman. But old England herself cannot rival this sea-girdled kingdom in her clear, exhilarating air of summer, in her picturesque landscapes of checkerboard rice fields, certainly not in the scenic charm of the Inland Sea.

The roadway, dropping down from the plateau of Hiroshima, soon brought to view this sapphire-blue arm of old Ocean, and wound in and out along the coast. Here and there a ripple caught the glint of the sun; in the middle distance and beyond tiny wooded isles rose from the placid surface; now and again an ocean liner, awakening 470memories of far-off lands, glided by almost within hailing distance. In shallow coves unclad fishermen, exempt from sunburn, disentangled their nets and heaped high their catches in wicker baskets.

It needed a very few hours on the road to teach me that Japan is the home of the ultra-curious. Compared with the rural Jap the Arab is as self-absorbed as a cross-legged statue of the Enlightened One. I had but to pass through a village to suspend every activity the place boasted. Workmen dropped their tools, children forgot their games, girls left their pitchers at the fountain, even gossips ceased their chatter; all to stare wide eyed if I passed on, to crowd round me if I paused. Wherever I halted for a drink of water the town rose en masse to witness my unprecedented action. My thirst quenched, the empty vessel passed from hand to hand amid such a chorus of gasps as rises from a group of lean-faced antiquarians examining a vase of ante-Christian date. To stop for a lunch was almost dangerous, for the mob that collected at the entrance to the shop threatened to do me to death under the trampling clogs. In the smaller villages the aggregate population, men, women, and children, followed me out along the highway, leaving the hamlet as deserted as though the dogs of war had been loosed upon it. Once I passed a school at the recess hour. Its two hundred children trailed behind me for a long mile, utterly ignoring the jangling bell and the shouts of their excited masters.

Well on in the afternoon I had taken refuge from the sun in a wayside clump, when a youthful Jap, of short but stocky build, hurrying along the white route, turned aside and gave me greeting. There was nothing unusual in that action; a dozen times during the day some garrulous native, often with a knowledge of English picked up during Californian residence, had tramped a mile or more beside me. But the stocky youth threw himself down on the grass with a sigh of relief. He was out of breath; the perspiration ran in streams along his brown cheeks; his nether garments were white with the dust of the highroad. Like most villagers of the district he wore a dark kimona, faintly figured, a dull brown straw hat resembling a Panama, thumbed socks, and grass sandals. Perhaps his haste to overtake me had been prompted merely by the desire to travel in my company; but there was about him an air of anxiety that awakened suspicion.

I set off again and he jogged along beside me, mopping his streaming face from time to time with a sleeve of his kimona. He was 471more supremely ignorant of English than I of Japanese, but we contrived to exchange a few confidences by grunts and gestures. He, too, had walked from Hiroshima. The statement surprised me, for the white stones at the wayside showed that city to be twenty-five miles distant. Enured to tramping by more than a year “on the road,” I had covered the distance with ease; but it was no pleasure stroll for an undersized Jap.

Once my companion pointed from his legs to my own, raised his eyebrows, and sighed wearily. I shook my head. He pointed away before us with inquiring gesture.

“Kobe,” I shouted.

“So am I,” he responded by repeating the name and thumping himself on the chest.

I knew he was lying. Kobe was more than a hundred miles away; third-class fare is barely a sen a mile in Japan; it is far cheaper to ride than to buy food sufficient to sustain life on such a journey. The fellow was no beggar, for we had already toasted each other in a glass of saki. Certainly he was not covetous of the yens in my pocket, for he was small and apparently unarmed, and there was nothing of the footpad in his face or manner. Yet he seemed fearful of losing sight of me. When I stopped, he stopped; if I strode rapidly forward, he struggled to keep the pace, passing a sleeve over his face at more frequent intervals.

Could it be that he was a “plain clothes cop” sent to shadow me? The suspicion grew with every mile; it was confirmed when we entered a long straggling village. My companion dropped back a bit and, as we passed a police station, I caught him waving a surreptitious greeting to four officers in uniform, who nodded approval.

A spy! What reason had the police of Japan to dog my footsteps? My anger rose at the implied insult. The fellow was urging me to stop for the night; instead I redoubled my pace. Not far beyond the route forked, and, turning a deaf ear to his protests, I chose the branch that led away over steep foothills. The short legs of the Jap were unequal to the occasion. He broke into a dog trot and puffed along behind me. His grass sandals wore through; he winced when a pebble rolled under his feet. Night came on, the moon rose; and still I marched with swinging stride, the little brown man panting at my heels.

Three hours after sunset, amid the barking of dogs and the shouting of humans, I stalked into the village of Hongo and sat down in 472the doorway of an open shop. A moment later the spy, reeling like an inebriate, his face drawn and haggard, dropped at full length on the matting beside me. His endurance was exhausted; and small wonder, for Hiroshima was forty-six miles away over the hills.

In the twinkling of an eye we were surrounded by a surging throng of dirty yokels. For Hongo is a mere mountain hamlet and its inhabitants do not practice all the virtues for which their fellow countrymen are noted. To stay where we were was to court annihilation by the stampeding multitude. I struggled to my feet determined to press on. The spy screamed weakly and the villagers swept in upon us and imprisoned me within the shop. A long conference ensued. Then the spy, leaning on two men, hobbled up the street, while another band, promising by gestures to find me lodging, dragged me along with them, the mob howling at our heels.

The fourth or fifth booth beyond proved to be an inn,............