needs reformation, offering to reform it, and eating with
ostentation rice gruel which is served to him in cups by admiring
handmaidens. A wanderer from Kioto tells me that in the Chion-in,
loveliest of all the temples, he saw only three days ago the Colonel
mixed up with a procession of Buddhist priests, just such a procession
as the one I tried vainly to describe, and "tramping about as if the
whole show belonged to him." You cannot appreciate the solemnity of this
until you have seen the Colonel and the Chion-in temple. The two are
built on entirely different lines, and they don't seem to harmonise. It
only needs now Madame Blavatsky, cigarette in mouth, under the
_cryptomerias_ of Nikko, and the return of Mr. Caine, M. P., to preach
the sin of drinking _saki_, and the menagerie would be full.

Something should be done to America. There are many American
missionaries in Japan, and some of them construct clapboard churches and
chapels for whose ugliness no creed could compensate. They further
instil into the Japanese mind wicked ideas of "Progress," and teach that
it is well to go ahead of your neighbour, to improve your situation, and
generally to thresh yourself to pieces in the battle of existence. They
do not mean to do this; but their own restless energy enforces the
lesson. The American is objectionable. And yet--this is written from
Yokohama--how pleasant in every way is a nice American whose tongue is
cleansed of "right there," "all the time," "noos," "revoo," "raound,"
and the Falling Cadence. I have met such an one even now--a Californian
ripened in Spain, matured in England, polished in Paris, and yet always
a Californian. His voice and manners were soft alike, temperate were his
judgments and temperately expressed, wide was his range of experience,
genuine his humour, and fresh from the mint of his mind his reflections.
It was only at the end of the conversation that he startled me a little.

"I understand that you are going to stay some time in California. Do you
mind my giving you a little advice? I am speaking now of towns that are
still rather brusque in their manners. When a man offers you a drink
accept at once, and then stand drinks all round. I don't say that the
second part of the programme is as necessary as the first, but it puts
you on a perfectly safe footing. Above all, remember that where you are
going you must never carry anything. The men you move among will do that
for you. They have been