e sign "English
Books," over a book-shop. Desirous of purchasing some kind of a guide for
the road to Kobe, I enter the establishment, expecting at least to find
some one capable of understanding English. The young man in charge knows
never a word of English, and his stock of "English books" consists of
primers, spelling-books, etc., for the use of school-children.

The architecture of the villages above Shimonoseki is strikingly
artistic. The quaint gabled houses are painted a snowy white, and are
roofed with brown glazed tiles of curious pattern, also rimmed with
white. About the houses are hedges grotesquely clipped and trained in
imitation of storks, animals, or fishes, miniature orange and persimmon
trees, pretty flower-gardens and little landscape vanities peculiar to
the Japanese. Circling around through little valleys, over small
promontories and along smooth, gravelly stretches of sea-shore road, for
thirty miles, brings me to anchor for the night in a good-sized village.

Among my visitors for the evening is a young gentleman arrayed in shiny
top-boots, tight-fitting corduroy trousers, and jockey cap. In his
general make-up he is the "horsiest" individual I have seen for many a
day. One could readily imagine him to be a professional jockey. The
probability is, however, that he has never mounted a horse in his life.
In all likelihood he has become infatuated with this style of Western
clothes from studying a copy of the London Graphic, has gone to great
trouble and expense to procure the garments from Yokohama, and now
blossoms forth upon the dazed provincials of his native town in a make-up
that stamps him as the swellest of the swell He affects great interest in
the bicycle--much more so than the average Jap--from which I infer
that he has actually imbibed certain notions of Western sport, and is
desirous of posing before his uninitiated and, consequently,
unappreciative, countrymen, as an exponent of athletics. Altogether the
horsey young gentleman is the most startling representative of "New
Japan" I have yet encountered.

A cold drizzle ushers in the commencement of my next day's journey. One
is loath to exchange the neat yadoya, with everything within so spotless
and so pleasant, the tiny garden, not over ten yards square, but
containing a miniature lake, grottos, quaint stone lanterns, bronze
storks, flowers, and stunted trees, for the road. Disagreeable weather
has followed me, however, from Nagasaki