t
sounded very strange to hear American and English lullabies being
chanted by these tots in the unfamiliar Japanese words.

Osaka, the chief manufacturing city of Japan, is only about
three-quarters of an hour's ride from Kobe. It spreads over nine miles
square and lies on both sides of the Yodogawa river. The most
interesting thing in Osaka is the castle built by Hideyoshi, the
Napoleon of Japan, in 1583. The strong wall was once surrounded by a
deep moat and an outer wall, which made it practically impregnable. What
will surprise anyone is the massive character of the inner walls which
remain. Here are blocks of solid granite, many of them measuring forty
feet in length by ten feet in height. It must have required a small army
of men to place these stones in position, but so well was this work
done (without the aid of any mortar) that the stones have remained in
place during all these years. From the summit of the upper wall a superb
view may be gained of the surrounding country.

From Kobe the tourist makes the trip through the Inland Sea by steamer.
Its length is about two hundred and forty miles and its greatest width
is forty miles. The trip through this sea, which in some places narrows
to a few hundred feet, is deeply interesting. The hills remind a
Californian strongly of the Marin hills opposite San Francisco, but here
they are terraced nearly to their summits and are green with rice and
other crops. Many of the hills are covered with a growth of small cedar
trees, and these trees lend rare beauty to the various points of land
that project into the sea. At two places in the sea the steamer seems as
though she would surely go on the rocks in the narrow channel, but the
pilot swings her almost within her own length and she turns again into a
wider arm of the sea. In these narrow channels the tide runs like a mill
race, and without a pilot (who knows every current) any vessel would be
in extreme danger. The steamer leaves Kobe about ten o'clock at night
and reaches Nagasaki, the most western of Japanese cities, about seven
o'clock the following morning.

Nagasaki in some ways reminds one of Kobe, but the hills are steeper and
the most striking feature of the town is the massive stone walls that
support the streets winding around the hills, and the elaborate paving
of many of these side-hill streets with great blocks of granite. The
rainfall is heavy at Nagasaki, so we find here a good system of gutters
to car