reached Japan, and throughout her
stay, two-sworded men were as thick almost as blackberries. To
European prepossessions it was illuminating to see half a dozen riding
down a street, hatless, crown of the head shaved, with a short pigtail
at the back tied tight near the skull and then brought stiffly forward
close to the scalp; their figures gowned, the handles of the two
swords projecting closely together from the left side of their
garments, and the feet resting in stirrups of slipper form, which my
memory says were of straw-work; but of that I am less sure. This
equipment was completed by a painted fan stuck in the belt, and at
times an opened paper umbrella. I have been passenger in the same boat
with some of these warriors, accoutred as above, and using their fans
as required, while engaged in animated conversation with the courtesy
and smiling affability characteristic of all classes in Japan. Such,
in outward seeming, then was the as yet raw material, out of which
have been evolved the heroic soldiery who have recently astonished the
world by the practical development they have given to modern military
ideas; then as unlike the troops which now are, except in courage, as
the ancient Japanese war-junk is to the present battle-ship. I was in
Japan at the arrival of their first iron-clad, purchased in the United
States, and doubtless long since consigned to the scrap-heap; but of
her hereafter.

A glance over the list of vessels in the _Navy Register_ of 1907 shows
me that the once abundant Indian names have disappeared, except where
associated with some State or city; or, worse, have been degraded to
tugboats, a treatment which the Indian, with all his faults, scarcely
deserves. They no longer connote ships of war. _Iroquois_, _Seminole_,
_Mohican_, _Wyoming_, _Oneida_, _Pawnee_, and some dozens more, are
gone with the ships, and like the tribes, which bore them. Yet what
more appropriate to a vessel meant for a scout than the tribal epithet
of a North American Indian! _Dacotah_, alone survives; while for it
the march of progress in spelling has changed the _c_ to _k_, and
phonetically dropped the silent, and therefore supposedly useless,
_h_. As if silence had no merits! is the interjection, _ah_,
henceforth to be spelled _a_? Since they with their names have passed
into the world of ghosts--can there be for them a sea in the happy
hunting-grounds?--it may be historically expedient to tell what manner
of craft t