places by cows bearing bales of goods from the city to the country,
and produce from the hanging gardens to the streets, an occasional
horse mustered in, and also a few oxen. The beast of burden most
frequently overtaken or encountered was the cow, and a majority of
the laborers were women. There were even in teams of twos and fours,
carrying heavy luggage, men and women, old, middle-aged and young,
barefooted or shod with straw, not overloaded, as a rule, and some
walking as if they had performed their tasks and were going home. On
the road it was patent there was extraordinary freedom from care as
to clothing, and no feeling of prejudice or dismay if portions of it
esteemed absolutely essential in North America and Europe had been
left behind or was awaiting return to the possessor. This applies to
both sexes. The day was warm, even hot, and the sun shone fiercely on
the turnpike--for that is what we would call it--making walking, with
or without loads, a heating exercise. Even the bearing of baskets,
and the majority of the women carried them, was justification
under the customs of the country for baring the throat and chest
to give ample scope for breathing, and there is no restriction in
the maintenance of the drooping lines of demarkation, according to
the most liberal fashionable allowances, in dispensing with all the
misty suggestions of laces to the utmost extent artists could ask,
for the study of figures. Beauty had the advantage of the fine curves
of full inhalations of the air that circulated along the dusty paths
between the sea and the mountains. It is a puzzle that the artists of
Japan have not better improved the unparalleled privilege of field and
wall sketching, that they enjoy to a degree not equalled within the
permission of the conventional construction of that which is becoming
in the absence of the daylight habilaments of any great and polite
people. The art schools of Japan, out of doors, on the highway, even,
cannot fail to produce atmospheric influences of which the world will
have visions hereafter, and the Latin quarter of Paris will lose its
reputation that attracts and adjusts nature to inspiration.

When we had succeeded, at Kobe, in convincing the authorities that none
of the passengers on the China had picked up the plague at Hongkong,
we put out into the big sea, and shaped our course for the fairer
land so far away, not exactly a straight line, for the convexity of
the earth that incl