We wakened, stiff and sore, a full two hours after noon. Yoritomo, who was first to rouse up, ran to the door to look out. He turned about, with an urgent cry that cut short my yawnings in the midst: “Up! up, brother! We’ve slept past midday. We must lose no time if we expect to reach the heart of Yedo by nightfall.”

“Do you remember the two biscuits I wrapped in my bundle?” I demanded. “I’m famished. A drink and a biscuit for me before I take to any road race.”

“We must dress and eat. There is water outside,” he responded, and he slashed open our bundles.

Not a drop of water had penetrated the oil-paper wrappings. We slipped off our stained and tattered Yamabushi robes to put on the silken garments which he had carried from his country all the long voyage to Europe and back. First came a pair each of the gorgeous baggy trousers, or hakama. They were provided with side slits, into which we tucked the skirts of our silk kimonos. The narrow twisted obi, or sash, served to hold my revolvers and the magnificent Masamune sword presented to me by Yoritomo that eventful night in the cabin of the Sea Flight.

My friend thrust his sword and dirk into his girdle, not in the horizontal Japanese fashion, but vertically, as I wore mine, that the scabbards might not show beneath our outer robes. His writing case and the bag containing his smoker’s outfit were secured on the other side by passing the carved ivory buttons of their cords through a fold of the girdle. Inside, about my waist, I placed my twenty odd pounds of metallic revolver cartridges, while he packed within his bosom a lighter though bulkier load consisting of white silk foot-mittens, extra sandals, a roll of crinkly writing paper, and the box with the remainder of his gold coins.

Over all we drew our cloak-like coats, or haoris, of rich stiff silk, upon which the circled mallow-leaf trefoil of the Tokugawa crest was embroidered on back, breasts, and sleeves. These coats were in turn covered with our dingy priest robes, and we were outwardly prepared to take the road. There remained our inward preparation. We took our ship’s biscuits and passed out the narrow entrance.

My first glance was directed towards Fujiyama. But the glorious peak was shrouded from view by a bank of envious clouds. Yoritomo turned at once to a hollowed stone from which trickled a rill of pure water. We drank and crouched down beside the spring to gnaw at our biscuits. At first I was too hungry to heed my surroundings. Yoritomo, however, soon pointed southward, through a gap in the shrubbery, to where, some four miles distant, a hilly promontory jutted out into the bay.

“That is the town of Kanagawa,” he said.

“Where?” I asked. “I see no smoke. Do you mean that little gray blotch low down on the edge of the promontory?”

“No, that is only a small fishing village lying among the rice swamps,—Yokohama, I believe, is its name. Kanagawa lies about two miles to the west of it. You see no smoke because in Japan we use charcoal only. Kanagawa is the last station on the Tokaido where the daimios stop over night before marching into Yedo.”

“But the sons of the daimios repose amidst the splendors of the temples,” I bantered him.

He glanced about reverently at the decaying little edifice. “The spirit of Shinto is simplicity. Yet I wish I could have entertained you with proper hospitality, and that we might enter Yedo in the manner to which we are entitled by our rank.”

“Ours?” I questioned. “Are we not brothers?” he countered.

“You know the position of my family at home,” I said. “But it is a far cry from America to Dai Nippon. I have read what the Dutch writers tell about the hauteur of your nobility. Even as a friend of a kinsman of your Emperor, will I be received?”

“I am not the kinsman of the Emperor,” he replied.

“You’re not? Yet you said that your father, the Prince of Owari—”

“He and the princes of Kii and Mito are the heads of the August Three Families, descendent from the three sons of Iyeyasu. He is the cousin of the Shogun, not of the Emperor. One alone can be called Emperor of Nippon. That is the Dairi—the Mikado, lineal descendant of Ama-terasu, the Sun Goddess. The sacred Son of Heaven lives in awesome seclusion at Kyoto.”

“Yet I am aware that your shoguns, whom the outer world has known as the temporal emperors, have ruled Nippon with mailed fist since the days of my ancestor, the English counsellor of Iyeyasu.”

He stared at me in blank astonishment. “The English counsellor of Iyeyasu!—he your ancestor?—Anjin Sama your ancestor?”

“Will Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan,” I answered. “Surely you have heard of him.” “Adams! Was that the English name of Anjin Sama?—and he your ancestor? You never told me!”

“How much have you told me of your family, Tomo?”

“But Anjin Sama, of all the kami—!” He gazed at me with a strange glow in his black eyes. “You know our belief, Worth, that the dead come back many times and are often born again.”

“The Buddhistic reincarnation,” I remarked.

“And the Shinto rebirth of the kami—the high ones,” he added.

“But what of Will Adams?” I demanded, aflame with curiosity. “I know that he married a Japanese wife and left children by her. Have they any living descendants?”

He looked away, with an enigmatic smile.

“You may learn more of your ancestor, brother, after we reach Yedo. There is an Anjin Street, whose householders still hold a yearly festival in his memory.—Come; it is time for us to be going.”

As he spoke, he rose and started around the corner of the temple. I followed him to the corner and back along the side of the decaying building, below the ragged thatch of the eaves. At the rear corner we came to a narrow gap in the shrubbery looking down upon the Tokaido. Yoritomo suddenly turned about, with his fingers to his lips, and drew me down.

“Kwannon be praised!” he whispered. “They did not see us! For common beggar-priests to be caught staring down upon a daimio’s train—Namu!”

I peered forward and down into the Tokaido, which ran past less than a hundred yards below us. Along the broad roadway was marching the most curious and stately procession I had ever seen. It was the retinue of a daimio who was going up to Yedo for the half-year’s visit required by law. By far the greater part of the procession was already strung out Yedo-ward farther than the eye could see. But half a thousand of the rearguard had yet to pass.

Used as I was to the sight of Yoritomo’s garments, there was much to surprise and interest me in the appearance of the daimio’s retainers. Though as short as our women, they were of a more stalwart build than I had expected, and the samurais, or two-sword men, carried themselves with a proud assurance that went far towards offsetting their lack of height. Among the loose ranks of these gentlemanly men-at-arms marched lesser retainers,—grooms with grotesquely accoutred led-horses and porters with rattan baskets and lacquered chests.

Yoritomo whispered that the box-like palanquin, or norimon, of the daimio had long since been carried past by its bearers. Yet this rear end of the procession marched slowly along with a demeanor that could not have been exceeded in solemnity and stateliness had the daimio been present in its midst. The hush was almost oppressive. No man among them called out or spoke or even whispered. The only sounds were the scuffle of sandals in the dusty road and the muffled thud of straw-shod horse hoofs.

“What is the crest?” I whispered, staring at the insignia embroidered on the outer garments of every retainer and marked on every piece of baggage. “It looks like a white cross in a circle.”

“A circled cross,” confirmed Yoritomo. “You saw it in Kagoshima Bay,—the crest of my friend Nariakiri, Daimio of Satsuma.”

“The Prince of Satsuma!” I exclaimed. “Why not hasten down and join him?”

“Hasten down, and be slashed or beheaded by the first samurai we passed!” rejoined Yoritomo, grasping my sleeve as I sought to spring up. “Even without these tattered robes it would mean certain death. Each daimio is appointed a time for passing along the highroad. Any one who breaks in upon the procession may expect to die without benefit of medicine.”

“But he is your friend, and if you are so anxious to reach home by nightfall—” “There are no by-ways through the rice swamps,” he replied. “We must trail after the rearguard.”

“They move at a snail’s pace!”

“It will bring them into Shinagawa, the southern suburb of Yedo, about sunset. In Shinagawa I expect to find a friend with whom we can spend the night. Meantime we may as well wait here until the cortege has gone on four or five miles. I will take advantage of the opportunity to write a petition asking permission to present a memorial to the Shogun.”

He crept back around the corner of the temple. I stretched out in the balsamic shade of the pines, and watched the slow passing of the procession. When the last strutting samurai had marched on up the road, I gazed around at the landscape. Across the full width of the bay the mountains on the promontory of Awa loomed dimly through the haze, while the blue waters between, already stilled from their night’s turmoil, were dotted with the white sails of junks and fishing smacks.

Inland the golden sunlight streamed down out of the sapphire sky upon a scene no less peaceful and charming. About me and far to the northward the land lay in broad plain, for the most part cut up into a checkerboard of rice fields. Here and there rose knolls and hills, some terraced to the top for rice, others wooded, and the most eminent crowned with temples that reminded me of China. In the rice swamps naked peasants, knee-deep in the slush, were transplanting tufts of young rice, while about them waterfowl waded or paddled, untroubled by the presence of man. Above them soared numbers of eagles and hawks. Birds were to be seen or heard on every side, but I noticed a marked absence of animals from the landscape.

Some time after the rear of the procession had disappeared up the Tokaido, Yoritomo came back around the temple, and said that we must start. I pulled my hat brim low over my face, and swung after him down the hillside to the smooth road.

For a time we met no other traveller. The road had been swept clear by the procession. But we soon came to groups of odd little shops and inns, strung along the roadside in almost continuous rows. Within the open fronts of the shops cotton-robed tradesmen knelt on matted platforms in the midst of their cheap wares, while from under the shallow porticos of the inns quaint little maidens with powdered doll-like faces and narrow skirts smiled at us invitingly and bowed until we could see the great bows at the back of their sashes. But Yoritomo kept on up the road at a fast pace, unmoved by the alluring glances of these charming little waitresses. Within the second mile we began to encounter a stream of travellers released from the post town of Kawasaki by the passage of the daimio’s train. We were the first to come up from the south in the wake of the daimio, but the people we met had no more than a casual glance for a pair of dirty-robed Yamabushi priests.

As we swung along through their midst I peeped out at them between the meshes of my loosely woven hat brim. My first observations were that they averaged far below the height of Americans, and that clothing was rather a minus quantity among all but the white-robed pilgrims and the silk-clad samurais. The brown skins of peasants and fishermen, porters, grooms, and beggars were either innocent of all covering except narrow loincloths or at most limited to a shirt-like kimono of blue-figured cotton, a straw hat, and sandals.

Aside from the aristocratic swordsmen, these people were the merriest I had ever met. When not smiling and chatting, they were laughing or singing. Among the peasants and groups of pilgrims were several women, the younger of whom possessed a buxom rural prettiness. The married women looked aged and withered, and pleasant as were their smiles, my Western eye was repulsed by their shaven brows and the gray-black teeth which showed between their rouged lips at every smile. At Kawasaki we swung briskly down to the bank of the Rokugu River, where bronzed ferrymen, stripped to loincloths, stood waiting for passengers in their big flat-bottomed punts. A boat in which the party of a samurai horseman had embarked was being thrust off. Before Yoritomo could check me, I sprang forward to leap aboard. In a flash the samurai drew his two-handed sword and aimed a blow at me that would have split my head in two had I not dropped backwards beyond reach. Furious at the wanton attempt to murder me, I sprang up and fumbled for a revolver as the boat shot out from the bank.

“Hold, brother!” warned Yoritomo, springing to catch my arm. “Remember, we are only begging priests. He had the right to resent our company. What’s more, he is a hatamoto, one of the Shogun’s samurais. If I remember aright, he is Yuki, a captain of the palace guard.”

“He tried to cut me down in cold blood!” I protested.

“It is a right of all samurais to kill lower-class men, and you affronted Yuki by seeking to board the same boat. Here’s a smaller boat putting off.”

We ran and leaped aboard the small boat as it swung into the stream. For fellow-passengers we had a wealthy old merchant, dressed in plain cotton robes, and the half-naked bearers of his narrow U-shaped basket-litter. In paying our ferry fees, Yoritomo offered one of his gold pieces, and the boat’s owner being unable to make full change, he gave him the difference. As a result the polers bent to their work with such hearty good-will that we reached the opposite bank a full three lengths in advance of the samurai’s boat.

We sprang ashore past a bevy of little brown children who were paddling, stark naked, in the mud. Shortly beyond we met a pair of neatly dressed girls, whose large mushroom hats rested upon black silk skullcaps. They smiled and greeted us in a familiar manner. Yoritomo muttered a hasty response, and pointed back at the samurai. The girls hastened to advance upon that quick-tempered gentleman, with their battery of charming smiles and alluring glances in full action.

“Courtesans?” I asked, as we swung on along the Tokaido.

“No, not joros, only bikunis—begging nuns, daughters of Yamabushi priests. None would be quicker to penetrate our disguise,” replied Yoritomo, and he quickened his pace.

After a mile or so we again met a crowd of southbound travellers, people caught at Omuri by the closing of the highroad. We hastened on to Omuri, the first post village out of Shinagawa. Recently as the daimio’s procession had passed, the place was already alert for business, its shops wide open and teahouse girls standing coy-eyed in the verandas. We hastened on through, pausing only to buy some large dried persimmons that caught my eye.

A mile behind the town we came up with the rear of the Satsuma procession, and were compelled by prudence to slacken our pace to a tortoise-like gait. Making the best of the situation, I relished my persimmons and viewed the scenery. There was much novelty and pleasure in the sight of orange trees and bamboos and even an occasional banana and palm growing in the same garden with pines and other evergreens, while the deep-thatched roofs of the farmhouses were oddly attractive with the beds of blue irises and vivid red lilies blooming on their flattened ridges.

Above us towered the giant red-limbed cryptomerias of the Tokaido, with their pine-like foliage, while on our right the road skirted along near the sparkling blue waters of the bay, upon which sailed flotillas of quaint fishing craft and high-sterned junks that might have served as models for a painter of the sixteenth century.

Yoritomo touched my arm and pointed to something lying on the opposite side of the road. I looked closer, and saw that it was the corpse of a peasant, mangled by terrible sword cuts. “A drunken fool,” he said, unmoved by the horrible sight. “No sober man would have been found in the road after it had been sanded for the passage of a daimio.”

Before I could reply, a little bell tinkled in the road behind us, and Yoritomo drew me quickly out of the middle of the thoroughfare. I glanced about and saw two runners racing towards us at headlong speed. One carried the little bell I had heard, the other bore a small bundle on a stick, across his shoulder. Both were stripped to their loincloths, though at first glance I thought that they were clad in tights, so completely were they covered with animal designs tattooed in red, blue, and white.

In a moment the couriers had dashed past us and were flying on, regardless of the stately cortege that barred the road. With the murdered peasant fresh in mind, I looked to see the Satsuma men turn about with sword and lance to avenge this outrage upon the dignity of their lord. To my vast astonishment, the solemn ranks split apart all along the centre of the road at the first tinkle of the little bell, and the naked runners raced on without a check through the midst of the procession.

“Carriers of despatches for the Shogun,” explained Yoritomo in response to my look of amazed inquiry. Here was food for thought to last me into Shinagawa, slow as was our pace. Nowhere in the world had I witnessed such solemn state as was exhibited by this daimio cortege, a state so exalted that men were killed for venturing within sword-sweep of the procession’s vanguard. Yet at the tinkle of a bell, all had yielded the road to a pair of naked, sweaty, unarmed postmen. What, then, must be the sublimity of rank and state arrogated to himself by the master of this prince? Yet the father of the quiet, mild-mannered gentleman trudging along in the dust beside me was the blood kinsman of that Oriental lord of lords.

We were close upon Shinagawa before I realized that the sun was far down the western sky and fast sinking behind a bank of black clouds. As I looked up my eye fell upon a rude pillory, standing near the roadside on ground raised above the level of the rice swamp. Along the top of the rude structure sat five roundish objects sharply outlined against the blood-red sky. Looking closer, I made out ghastly human faces—a crow flapped up from the ground, with a hoarse cry, and began pecking at one of the severed heads.