fter rolling in a heavy sea all
night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea,
made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our
deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes,
and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm
of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept
between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here
and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by
symbolic _Torii_ leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing
villages that seemed to have grown on the shore, their thatched roofs
covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "_Yane-shobu_."
At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the
enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked
gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in
_geta_ and _kimono_, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene
of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic
of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,--a magic
that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions,
telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile
as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of
heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and
China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men
who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their
country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the
death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields
of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur.

A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself
from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we
crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the
eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then
paled to green.

There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead.
And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy
peculiar to Japan, we dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the
Ghost of Waters. We saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the
water grasses that bend in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the
falling dew was the spray from the herdsman's oar. A