udes the water, for the ocean--particularly the
Pacific--is rounded so that the straightest line over its surface is
a curved line, if astronomically mentioned. We struck out on the great
Northern circle, purposing to run as high as the forty-eighth parallel,
almost to our Alutian Islands, and pursued our course in full view,
the bald cliffs of Japan changing their color with the going down of
the sun. When morning came the purple bulk of the bestirring little
empire still reminded us of the lights and shadows of Asia and the
missionary labors of Sir Edwin Arnold, which have a flavor of the
classics and a remembrance of the Scriptures. "Yonder," said the
Captain, "is the famous mountain of Japan, Fugeyana. It is not very
clearly seen, for it is distant. Oh, you are looking too low down and
see only the foot-hills--that is it, away up in the sky!" It was there,
a peak so lofty that it is solitary. We were to have seen it better
later, but as the hours passed there was a dimness that the light of
declining day did not disperse, and the mountain stayed with us in
a ghostly way, and held its own in high communion.

As we were leaving Asian waters there came a demand for typhoons
that the Captain satisfied completely, saying he was not hunting
for them, but the worst one he ever caught was five hundred miles
east of Yokohama. The tourists were rather troubled. The young man
who had been in the wild waltz of the Zealandia did not care for
a typhoon. We had been blessed with weather so balmy and healing,
winds so soft and waves so low, that the ship had settled down steady
as a river steamboat. We pushed on, but the best the China could do
was fourteen knots and a half an hour, near 350 knots a day, with a
consumption of 135 tons of coal in twenty-four hours. So much for not
having been cleaned up so as to give the go of the fine lines. The
China had been in the habit of making sixty miles a day more than of
this trip, burning less than 100 tons of coal. As we climbed in the
ladder of the parallels of latitude, we began to notice a crispness
in the air, and it was lovely to the lungs. It was a pleasure, and
a stimulant surpassing wine, to breathe the north temperate ozone
again, and after a while to catch a frosty savor on the breeze. We
had forgotten, for a few days, that we were not in a reeking state of
perspiration. Ah! we were more than a thousand miles north of Manila,
and that is as far as the coast of Maine to Cuba. Th