a complete stop was put to our horseback
excursions in the country, a deprivation the more felt because
coinciding with an unusually fine spell of weather; but in a few days
an envoy arrived from the insurgent daimios, with whom a settlement
was speedily reached. Chiosiu and Satsuma had by this time succeeded
in establishing themselves as the real representatives of the Mikado,
an authority in virtue of which alone the Tycoon had ruled; the true
headship of the Mikado being admitted by all. They undertook that
foreigners should be adequately protected, and that the officer
responsible for the late outrage should be punished with death. By the
20th of February Kobe was full of Chiosiu and Satsuma samurai, who
were as courteously civil as those of the Tycoon had been; and after a
conference with the special envoy of the Mikado the ministers
returned to Osaka. We, too, resumed our country rides, but still
weighted with a huge navy revolver.

No doubt on any hand was felt of the sincere purpose of the new
government to fulfil its pledges; but their troops were still
ill-organized, and it was impossible to rest assured that they might
not here and there break bounds, as at Kobe. We were encountering the
accustomed uncertainties of a period of revolutionary transition,
intensified by prejudices engendered through centuries of national
isolation, with all the narrowing and deepening of prepossession which
accompanies entire absence of intercourse with other people. At this
very moment, in March, 1868, the decree against the practice of
Christianity by the natives was reissued: "Hitherto the Christian
religion has been forbidden, and the order must be strictly kept. The
corrupt religion is strictly forbidden." Yet I am persuaded that
already far-seeing Japanese had recognized that the past had drifted
away irrevocably, and that the only adequate means to meet the
inevitable was to accept it fully, without grudging, and to develop
the nation to equality with foreigners in material resources. But such
anticipation is the privilege of the few in any age or any country.

Very soon after the return of our men from their garrison duty, an
outbreak of small-pox on board the _Iroquois_ compelled her being sent
to Yokohama, where, as an old-established port, were hospital
facilities not to be found in Kobe, though we had succeeded in
removing the first cases to crude accommodations on shore. The disease
was then very prevalent in Jap