beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."--_Emerson._

This morning, after the sorrows of the rolling night, my cabin porthole
showed me two great grey rocks studded and streaked with green and
crowned by two stunted blue-black pines. Below the rocks a boat, that
might have been carved sandal wood for colour and delicacy, was shaking
out an ivory-white frilled sail to the wind of the morning. An
indigo-blue boy with an old ivory face hauled on a rope. Rock and tree
and boat made a panel from a Japanese screen, and I saw that the land
was not a lie. This "good brown earth" of ours has many pleasures to
offer her children, but there be few in her gift comparable to the joy
of touching a new country, a completely strange race, and manners
contrary. Though libraries may have been written aforetime, each new
beholder is to himself another Cortez. And I was in Japan--the Japan of
cabinets and joinery, gracious folk and fair manners. Japan, whence the
camphor and the lacquer and the shark-skin swords come: among what was
it the books said?--a nation of artists. To be sure, we should only stop
at Nagasaki for twelve hours ere going on to Kobe, but in twelve hours
one can pack away a very fair collection of new experiences.

An execrable man met me on the deck, with a pale-blue pamphlet fifty
pages thick. "Have you," said he, "seen the Constitution of Japan? The
Emperor made it himself only the other day. It is on entirely European
lines."

I took the pamphlet and found a complete paper Constitution stamped with
the Imperial Chrysanthemum--an excellent little scheme of
representation, reforms, payment of members, budget estimates, and
legislation. It is a terrible thing to study at close quarters, because
it is so pitifully English.

There was a yellow-shot greenness upon the hills round Nagasaki
different, so my willing mind was disposed to believe, from the green of
other lands. It was the green of a Japanese screen, and the pines were
screen pines. The city itself hardly showed from the crowded harbour. It
lay low among the hills, and its business face--a grimy bund--was sloppy
and deserted. Business, I was rejoiced to learn, was at a low ebb in
Nagasaki. The Japanese should have no concern with business. Close to
one of the still wharves lay a ship of the Bad People; a Russian steamer
down from Vladivostok. Her decks were cumbered with raffle of all kinds;
her rigging was as frowsy and draggled as the ha