tive Japanese, determined, if
necessary, to push on to Yeddo.

The Japanese quarter of Yokohama is called Benten, after the goddess of
the sea, who is worshipped on the islands round about. There
Passepartout beheld beautiful fir and cedar groves, sacred gates of a
singular architecture, bridges half hid in the midst of bamboos and
reeds, temples shaded by immense cedar-trees, holy retreats where were
sheltered Buddhist priests and sectaries of Confucius, and interminable
streets, where a perfect harvest of rose-tinted and red-cheeked
children, who looked as if they had been cut out of Japanese screens,
and who were playing in the midst of short-legged poodles and yellowish
cats, might have been gathered.

The streets were crowded with people. Priests were passing in
processions, beating their dreary tambourines; police and custom-house
officers with pointed hats encrusted with lac and carrying two sabres
hung to their waists; soldiers, clad in blue cotton with white stripes,
and bearing guns; the Mikado's guards, enveloped in silken doubles,
hauberks and coats of mail; and numbers of military folk of all
ranks--for the military profession is as much respected in Japan as it
is despised in China--went hither and thither in groups and pairs.
Passepartout saw, too, begging friars, long-robed pilgrims, and simple
civilians, with their warped and jet-black hair, big heads, long busts,
slender legs, short stature, and complexions varying from copper-colour
to a dead white, but never yellow, like the Chinese, from whom the
Japanese widely differ. He did not fail to observe the curious
equipages--carriages and palanquins, barrows supplied with sails, and
litters made of bamboo; nor the women--whom he thought not especially
handsome--who took little steps with their little feet, whereon they
wore canvas shoes, straw sandals, and clogs of worked wood, and who
displayed tight-looking eyes, flat chests, teeth fashionably blackened,
and gowns crossed with silken scarfs, tied in an enormous knot behind
an ornament which the modern Parisian ladies seem to have borrowed from
the dames of Japan.

Passepartout wandered for several hours in the midst of this motley
crowd, looking in at the windows of the rich and curious shops, the
jewellery establishments glittering with quaint Japanese ornaments, the
restaurants decked with streamers and banners, the tea-houses, where
the odorous beverage was being drunk with saki, a liquor conco