through wastes of snow, up mountain
sides, through long chasms, passing continually from sun to shadow, and
from shadow to sun, the mountains interposing their white heads, and
ever heaping themselves in a huge maze behind, are above the average of
ordinary traveller's prose, but there is no page that can be called
arresting or original. The impressions seem to be written to order,
written, in fact, as subordinate to the artist's illustrations. So
irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's illustrations
become, that it is said to have been one of the reasons for the rupture
of his contract with Harpers almost immediately after his arrival in
Japan.

The seventeen days that he passed on the northern Pacific, with their
memories of heavy green seas and ghostly suns, the roaring of the
rigging and spars against the gale, the steamer rocking like a cradle as
she forced her way through the billowing waves, are well described.
There is a weird touch, too, in his description of the Chinese steerage
passengers, playing the game of "fan-tan" by the light of three candles
at a low table covered with a bamboo mat.

Deep in the hold below he imagines the sixty square boxes resembling
tea-chests, covered with Chinese lettering, each containing the bones of
a dead man, bones being sent back to melt into that Chinese soil from
whence, by nature's vital chemistry, they were shapen ... and he
imagines those labelled bones once crossing the same ocean on just such
a ship, and smoking or dreaming their time away in just such berths, and
playing the same strange play by such a yellow light, in even just such
an atmosphere, heavy with vaporised opium.

"Meanwhile, something has dropped out of the lives of some of us, as
lives are reckoned by Occidental time,--a day. A day that will never
come back again, unless we return by this same route,--over this same
iron-grey waste, in the midst of which our lost day will wait for
us,--perhaps in vain."

Not from the stormy waters of the Pacific, however, not from gleaming
Canadian pinnacles, or virgin forests, or dim canyons, was this child of
the South and the Orient, this interpreter of mankind in all his exotic
and strange manifestations to draw his inspiration, but from the valleys
and hill-sides of that immemorial East that stretched in front of him,
manured and fructified by untold centuries of thought and valour and
belief.

The spell fell on him from the moment that, thro