THE lakes which lie to the north of Fuji are not much visited by foreigners; they are rather difficult of access, and the accommodation in the tea-houses in that district is not luxurious; but for those who can walk well, and put up with ordinary Japanese food and lodging, the scenery will atone for everything. The old hills on the north once looked over a great sloping plain to the shore of Suruga Bay, but the upstart Fuji arose and blocked their view to the south; streams of lava poured from it, and rolled down till they were stopped by these buttresses of ancient rock, damming the rivers, and so forming this chain of lakes at their base. Where the lava has been covered with fine ashes, vegetation soon begins to conceal the work of destruction, but the larger flows resist all attempts at cultivation; they still stand in wide ridges above the rest of the country, gray lichens cover them, and dwarfed trees find a foothold in the crevices between their blocks. The winding tracks which lead across them are bad enough, for every little hump in the path is not a pebble which rolls aside as your foot touches it, but is a knob of solid rock, and it is your toe that has to give way; the untrodden part of the scrubby forest would stop any animal but an active monkey. We traversed one of the widest flows, called Aoki-ga-hara (green-tree moor), from the number of evergreens which grow over it, on the way between Shoji, the smallest, and Motosu, the largest of the lakes, walking for hours in single file along a narrow trail with hardly an opening anywhere in the dense foliage; it was late in the evening, and the imprecations in Japanese and English ought to have thrown a lurid light on that dusky path. The dividing-line between the lava and the older rock is as clearly visible now as it was on that day when the molten torrent was arrested in its course and piled itself in a solid wave against the immovable hills. Some subterranean settling must still be going on, for a few years ago the lakes began to rise, and they have remained at the higher level, so that as we rowed along the shore we could see below us the roofs of cottages and the fences of rice-fields, and forests of dead pines rose gaunt and bare out of the water. Of all the places I saw in Japan, Motosu seemed the most remote; the rise of the lake must have ruined many of the inhabitants, and a settled gloom seemed to hang over the few charcoal-burners, wood-cutters, and fishermen who remain. We found rooms in an old tea-house, where fine wood-work, now blackened and decayed, showed signs of a former prosperity which will hardly revive unless prices rise, for when we left the next morning the landlord sadly presented us with a bill for nineteen sen (about sixpence), which for two foreigners and two servants came to a very modest sum per head. We crossed the lake by boat, and were landed at the foot of a trackless hill-side, overgrown with tall grasses and wild flowers, through which it was difficult to walk, but our local guides soon found a path which led us in the direction of the Fujikawa. Here we were off the volcanic soil, the beeches and other trees were magnificent, and in one wood we walked between banks of maidenhair fern (Adiantum pedatum) growing five or six feet high. How well I remember that day of glorious sunshine, the view back over the lake with Fuji towering

behind it, the mountain road through forests with new trees and plants at every turn, the gaudy butterflies, the long zigzag descent by the pine-clad spur which brought us to the Suzukawa Valley, and the gorgeous sunset as we whirled down the rapids to Shimoyama. There are five lakes in the chain, Motosu, Shoji, Nemba, Kawaguchi, and Yamanaka, and they descend in level from Motosu on the west to Yamanaka on the east. Nemba lies in a hollow of wooded hills, with a couple of partially drowned villages on its shore, in which the cottage roofs are strangely constructed, and the people wear long knickerbockers of blue striped cotton. Kawaguchi is the most beautiful of them all; its waters have only risen a foot or two, so that no damage has been done except the submersion of a few fields, and Funatsu and Kodachi, with picturesque old temples and cottages shaded with gourds, like Jonah’s, are thriving towns compared with the other lake-side hamlets.

I was staying at Yoshida, within easy walking distance of Funatsu, in the early part of September, when all the countryside was keeping the Bon festival in memory of the dead—a sort of Japanese All-Souls day which lasts for a week. Fires were lighted at night on all the hill-sides; the path leading up to every little temple could be traced by a line of blazing spots, and the great lonely slope of Fuji was dotted with them here and there, marking the positions of the rest-houses and the few scattered huts of grass-cutters and charcoal-burners. I have seen the same thing in Switzerland, near Martigny, where on the eve of St. John’s day every cattle-tender far up the mountains greeted his distant neighbors with a bonfire. This part of the ceremony is called, in Japanese, hi-matsuri (fire festival). Other observances are placing offerings of food before the family graves, which in Yoshida were generally at the end of the back garden, and erecting a little altar in the house, on which dishes of rice, fruit, and sweetmeats are laid, and before which prayers are said.

We had a typhoon on the 4th of September, with such torrents of rain and gusts of wind that the houses had to be enclosed with their wooden shutters, and there was nothing to be done but lie on the floor in the darkness and listen to the turmoil of the elements outside. Suddenly, above all the other noises, I heard a monotonous chant, and, opening a crack in my shutters, I saw a procession of men, dressed only in “kasa” and straw rain-coats passing down the village street. Some of them carried big drums slung to poles, on which the others banged, while all of them groaned in unison a sentence which I could not catch. It was a long time before I could induce Matsuba to tell me what it all meant; but at last he confessed that it was done to drive away the storm-demon; he was evidently ashamed of this method of praying for fair weather, and explained that it was only in these out-of-the-way places his countrymen were so superstitious. Anyhow, it was efficacious, for the typhoon blew itself out during the night. There was more or less rain for some days after, but we had nothing again like that day’s downpour, and I started in more promising weather for a walk over the hills to Kofu. From Funatsu I crossed a corner of Kawaguchi, and took a steep mountain road on the other side; some kind of matsuri was going on there too, and the lake was dotted with boatfuls of people beating drums and singing. The road we took is said in the guide-books to be practicable for jinrikishas, but the typhoon had completed the work of destruction which the heavy rains in July had begun, and there were very few yards of it left over which a wheeled vehicle could travel. On the other side of the pass, Misaka-toge, where I stayed to lunch and admire the view of Fuji, and to collect seeds of a grand red lychnis which grew there abundantly, we went through a village, Nakagawa, that had been almost destroyed by a torrent. The street and the gardens were filled with bowlders and gravel and fallen tree trunks, and the roofs only were visible above the mass of wreckage. The well-fitted timbers of a Japanese roof, especially when there is a heavy thatch over them, make it the least destructible part of the house; the lower part may collapse in a typhoon or earthquake, but the roof settles down over the ruins practically uninjured. I saw one near the Tokaido which had been taken off bodily by the wind and deposited in a field the other side of the road without losing its shape. I looked for the river which had done all this damage to Nakagawa, and found only a little, innocent, prattling brook about a yard wide.

Kofu is a busy place in the centre of a large silk-growing district. All the hill-sides around are covered with scrubby-looking mulberry bushes, and in the villages almost every cottage had its pile of golden cocoons, which the women were winding off into skeins as they sat and chattered by their doorways. As you pass Japanese houses in fine weather you see almost everything that is going on inside; they are set down close to the road, and the sliding-screens allow you to look right through to the garden at the back. When it is cold or wet all the wooden shutters are closed, and they have then a very sad and deserted appearance. I went to a very good theatre in Kofu, and afterwards to what might be called a wax-work show, but that the figures were

made of carved and painted wood, where the incidents of the murder of Ii-Kamonno-Kami were represented with a startling fidelity to nature. He was assassinated one winter’s night in the streets of Tokyo by the retainers of a rival Daimio, and the snowy ground showed to advantage all the details of disembowelled bodies and mangled limbs. The last two figures were mechanical. A retainer kneeling in front of the Daimio slowly opened a bloody handkerchief and showed him the head of his enemy, whereupon the Daimio’s eyebrows went up and the corners of his mouth went down, giving him a most comical expression of horror.

The roads are wider here than in most parts of Japan, and there are comparatively few jinrikishas. Most of the travelling is done in basha, small wagonettes with no springs, which jolt the very life out of you. I engaged one to take me on to Lake Suwa, on the Nakasendo road, a journey of forty miles, and arrived there feeling like an aching jelly. After travelling a few miles from Kofu we came to a river where the bridge had been washed away. I and my baggage were ferried over, and the driver attempted to ford it, but the water was too deep for him, and I was left stranded with my impedimenta on a wide waste of pebbles. Fortunately the man with whom I had made my bargain had foreseen this possibility, and when I could get some coolies to help me with my baggage across half a mile of stones and bowlders, I found another basha waiting for me. All the first part of the journey was a long ascent through wooded, hilly country, with road-side villages at short intervals. In one of them, Tsutaki, where we stopped to change horses, a school treat was going on. The place was gayly decorated with lanterns and arches of leaves and paper flowers, and in the temple court-yard the children had made realistic figures, among them a life-sized tiger, ingeniously constructed with straws of different colors. The low wooden cottages, with broad eaves and stones piled on the top, looked very like Swiss chalets, except that they all had green roof crests, sometimes of iris, but more often of a bunchy kind of lycopodium which the natives called yuwashiba. Almost every one had a screen of bamboo on the south side, with gourds of different kinds growing up it and tumbling over the roof and the out-buildings. At last, with long spells of walking, very welcome as a rest from the weary jolting, we reached the tea-house at the top of the pass, and then rattled down a somewhat better road for about twelve miles, emerging at dusk into the broad mountain-guarded valley in which Suwa lies. The flat lands near the lake are intersected by little streams and canals, along which the peasants go to their work in long, narrow punts, very like those which are used for the same purpose in Picardy—another instance of the way in which similar conditions in widely distant countries lead to similar habits and inventions.

I stayed at Kami-no-suwa in a delightful tea-house, with clean polished wood-work, and quilts covered with a soft thin silk called kaiki, very pleasant and cooling to a mosquito-tortured skin. Cleanliness is the great luxury of the Japanese; their foot-gear is always removed before entering the house, so that the mats may not be soiled; the wood-work is never painted, stained, or varnished, but left with a well-planed surface, which shows its natural color; the ceilings are thin planks, slightly overlapping each other, the grain of each being carefully selected to combine with the lines in those next it; there are no hangings or fixed pieces of furniture to collect the dust, and no carpets to be taken up and shaken, so that spring cleaning, that terror of the Western house-keeper, is unnecessary; the whole room can be swept out every morning, the walls and ceiling rubbed with a duster, and there it is, all as neat as a

new pin. At Shimo-no-suwa, about three miles on, the Koshu-kaido, along which I had been travelling from Kofu, joins the Nakasendo, the central mountain road, one of the main routes between Kyoto and Tokyo. A new road has been made most of the way, admirably engineered, with gentle gradients, but so badly executed that it had already fallen to pieces in some places, and it was covered with loose road-metal which made jinrikisha travelling very laborious. My men usually preferred the old steep road, which cuts off corners, and is solid though very rough, and after a couple of days I sent back all the jinrikishas except the one which carried my baggage, finding my own legs the best means of conveyance. From the Shiojiri Pass I looked back over Suwa, saw Fuji through the blue haze of a lovely autumn morning, a long way off, but still towering above all the other hills, and then dropped down into a new set of mountains, rivers, and valleys. The scenery of the Nakasendo gets more and more picturesque, until it reaches a climax in the valley of the Kisogawa, on which I first looked from the summit of the Torii Pass, four thousand and odd feet above the sea. Each village on the road had its own peculiarities of costume, architecture, and manufacture—cheap lacquer-ware, combs, pickles, and so on, and of all these Matsuba bought a stock, for it is the habit of every Japanese on his travels to take back with him “meibutsu,” the characteristic productions of the places he has visited, as presents for those he has left at home.

There are many celebrated mountains in this district, each with its own special god and shrines, and I constantly met bands of pilgrims dressed in white, with long staves and big hats, or saw boat-loads of them going down

the Kisogawa in the few places where it is navigable. After some days of glorious weather, with a sun which turned the wings of the myriad dragon-flies hovering over the rivers to spots of light, and made all clothing seem superfluous, I was suddenly arrested by a violent storm at a little village called Suwara. A number of pilgrims had been driven to shelter in the same tea-house; they spent the day in chanting prayers, ringing a little bell, and tapping blocks of wood together to mark the time; and they began it again at three o’clock the next morning, before starting on their trudge. The motive of these pilgrimages is not in the least penitential. Certain hardships have to be endured by every traveller in mountain regions, but the Japanese are good walkers and accustomed to simple living, and in their composition they have a large stock of intelligent curiosity which makes them enjoy all that is new and beautiful in the country through which they pass. The history and literature of their fatherland form a large part of their education, and almost every remarkable spot has some legendary or poetical association apart from its natural beauty; their religion teaches them, too, that not only temples and shrines are sacred, but that every poetic thought or heroic deed, every grand tree or rock or lovely landscape, has in it something of the divine.

On the banks of the Kisogawa, not far from Suwara, there is a large flat rock, which is called Nezame-no-toko, the Bed of Awakening, for here Urashima the fisher-boy, a sort of Japanese Rip Van Winkle, is supposed by some to have returned to real life after his long trance. The usual version of the story is this: Urashima lived with his parents at Yura, by the sea of Japan, helping them in their fishing; but one day his boat did not return, and he was given up for dead. He had met the Sea-god’s daughter, who had taken him away to live with her and love her in an evergreen land. What seemed to him like a few weeks passed by in happiness, but at last he said, “My parents will be sorrowing for me; I must go back and comfort them,” and he prevailed on his princess to spare him for a while. She gave him a casket, saying that as long as he kept it closed she would always be with him, but if he opened it, she and the evergreen land would be lost to him forever. He had really been away for centuries, his home had disappeared, and everything in Yura was changed. In despair he opened the forbidden box, a faint blue mist floated out from it across the sea, he turned from a handsome youth to an old decrepit man, and in a few minutes lay dead upon the shore, for in that box his princess had enclosed all the hours of their happy life.

No portion of the Nakasendo is finer than that near Midono; the valley narrows and the road in many places overhangs the rushing Kisogawa, the vegetation is luxuriant, walnuts, oaks, chestnuts, and maples shade the road, and great groves of bamboo wave their plumes in every little breeze which comes down from the mountains through the ravines in which they grow. By the river-side I noticed many fine-leaved plants; some old garden friends, and others new to me; yellow wagtails fluttered jauntily from rock to rock, and lines of swallows on the telegraph wires showed that autumn was at hand.

I turned off from the Nakasendo at Hashiba, where it begins to ascend the Magome Pass, and took a little cross-country track, turning eastward again up the valley of the Hirosegawa, which, after two days’ walking, brought me to Iida and the banks of the Tenryugawa. This road was not mentioned in my guide-book, but Nakajima Sanju, the jinrikisha man who had accompanied me all the way from Kami-no-suwa, maintained that it was practicable, and that he could take my baggage through in his kuruma. He did

it, too, but I occasionally had to hire two extra men to help him, and in some places they and Matsuba had to carry kuruma, baggage and all. There was one long climb through a dense wood which particularly impressed me; I walked so far ahead of them that I could only just hear the continual cry, “Yo-sha! Yo-sha!” with which the men encouraged each other; the masses of foliage above me, the shrubs and ferns below them, enclosed me in a green maze; from under the arched roots of a colossal cryptomeria a clear little spring gushed out; occasionally a raucous-voiced jay flew across the path, or I had to stop and examine the huge toads, seven or eight inches long and almost as broad, that sprawled about on the road-side. When my men overtook me at a tea-house some miles farther on, one of them was carrying a brace of these toads skinned. They looked as big as the “poulet” of a cheap restaurant, and he told me that they were very good for weakly children.

At Tokimata I engaged a boat with five men to take me down the rapids as far as the Tokaido; the river was running high, and they would not do it for less than twenty-four yen—a good price for a journey of only ten or twelve hours; but when you remember that it takes them ten days or a fortnight to haul the boat back, it does not seem excessive. Don Pedro’s remark, “What need the bridge much wider than the flood?” does not apply to most of the Japanese rivers; usually they are just a trickle of water among a wide bed of pebbles, which is filled after heavy rains with a raging torrent, but Lake Suwa serves as a reservoir for the Tenryugawa, and it always has enough water to be navigable. The boats used on it are about thirty feet long, flat-bottomed and flat-sided, with a square stern and a high, pointed bow; they are very loosely built and flexible, and the bottom boards are so thin that they wabble like a sheet of paper when passing over rough water or shallows. A heavy foot would break through them, and it is necessary to tread only on the bamboos which are laid lengthwise, resting on the cross-ribs.

My baggage was piled in the middle of the boat, and a seat arranged on it for Matsuba and myself; one man took the long stern oar while the other four worked in the bows, and within a few minutes of the start we were plunging down between high cliffs, charging at rocks which we only avoided by a few inches, swirling round in eddies at the foot of one rapid while the men got breath for the next, and until we stopped for our mid-day meal at the little

village of Nakabe there was no time to sketch, or think, or do anything but enjoy the wild, exciting race. The river twists, between high mountains, down a gorge with such sharp curves that it is often impossible to see any exit, and our boat would rush down, heading straight for a cliff against which the water dashed furiously; while one man in the bows whacked the side with his paddle for luck, and then stood ready with a pole, the other three pulled like mad, and just when I thought “we must come to grief this time,” she would suddenly turn and swish round the corner into smoother water. The rapids continued to be amusing, though the fun was not quite so fast and furious, all the way to Kajima, where the mountains end and a broad plain begins; below here the river still ran swiftly, but smoothly, divided into several channels by long gravel banks, on which gray willows and bamboos grew, and snipe and herons congregated. We met strings of boats being laboriously towed along: the wind generally blows up stream, and they are

able on these lower reaches to help themselves by hoisting a sail, but I shall never understand how they get their boats back through those upper rapids. It was getting dark when we passed through the ruins of the old Tokaido bridge, but in the dusk I could distinguish a row of familiar Noah’s-ark-like forms; they were current-mills moored in the river; and then I knew what my day had lacked—the companionship of the man with whom I had passed so many hundreds of them on the Danube. There was nothing on the Danube quite so sporting as these rapids, but I think it would be possible to get through them in a decked canoe, such as those we used on that river. The pace is tremendous; we did the ninety miles from Tokimata to Naka-no-machi in ten hours of actual travelling, though the latter portion of the journey was on comparatively sluggish water.

About a month after this I stopped at Shizuoka, a large town on the Tokaido, where Ieyasu, greatest of the Shoguns, spent the end of his life in learned leisure, and where Keiki, the last of his successors, deposed in 1868, when the Mikado came to his own again, still lives quietly as a private gentleman. How much more dignified and reasonable is his Oriental acceptance of the accomplished fact than the restless scheming of some Western pretenders, who are unable to see that their ancestors, whether kings or emperors, owed their power to national feeling, and persist in a futile struggle against the inevitable! The Japanese obedience to law and authority, which must, however indirectly, be an expression of the will of the people, was never better shown than in the promptness with which the sword-bearing Samurai ceased to carry their weapons. The Samurai’s blade had been for centuries his most sacred possession, a halo of poetry surrounded it, and the right to wear it in public distinguished him from the common herd; and yet when the imperial edict was issued in 1876 he laid it aside without a

murmur, and the curio-shops were soon full of swords, which a month before their owners would sooner have died than lose. It was no doubt very inconvenient to walk about always with two swords stuck in your obi, and perhaps he felt like the curate in the “Bab Ballads,” who was forced by his mild rival to curl his hair and smoke—

but recent events show that though his ordinary life has become peaceful and bloodless, there has been no falling off in the pluck of a Japanese soldier.

Ieyasu was first buried at Kuno-zan, which I reached after about an hour’s ride by jinrikisha from Shizuoka. The first part of the way was over a rice-covered plain, from which gay-colored hills, striped with white buckwheat, dark green tea, and pale green daikon, gradually rose, narrowing down towards the sea, and finally leaving only a strip of sandy soil, mostly planted with sugar-cane, between the steep cliffs and the shore. The little villages were odorous with drying fish, slices of bonito hanging in festoons in front of every cottage, and the shore was dotted with evaporating-tubs for getting salt. The mortuary temples, which served as a model for those afterwards built at Nikko, stand on the top of the cliff, and are reached by a zigzag flight of steps cut out of the rock; they are not so elaborate as the Nikko temples or the Shiba shrines, but have a severer beauty of their own, which nature has helped by decorating every stone and tree-trunk with silvery gray lichen, lovely in color against the background of red-lacquered buildings. The interior of the oratory, which, with its surrounding fence, has a roof of bronze, is mostly black and gold, and there the very affable priests who had shown me round held a little service in honor of Ieyasu, presenting me afterwards with the sweet wine and cakes which had been used as offerings. It is commonly said that the body of the great Shogun still lies under the simple stone monument behind the oratory, and that only a few hairs were removed and buried at Nikko; certainly this is the more impressive spot for a warrior’s grave, with the wild hills behind, and the sea and coast spread out for miles below the towering cliff.

The road on to Okitsu, where I had to rejoin the railway, led me inland past Ryugeji, a temple where there are the finest specimens of the screw-palm (Cycas revoluta) to be seen in Japan, and then to the sea again at Shimizu, a nice little port, just opposite the sandy fir-clad spit of land called Mio-no-matsubara, enclosing a smaller bay in the great curve of Suruga, which often appears in Japanese pictures. This is the scene of a legend which has been dramatized, if you can call them dramas, for one of the classical No dances. It tells how a fisherman watching his nets saw a fairy alight on the sand and lay aside her robe of feathers; how he managed to steal the robe so that she could not fly away again, and only restored it to her when she consented to dance for him under the pine-trees one of the dances which are never seen by mortal eyes. Near the tea-house in Shimizu where I stopped to refresh there was a temple dedicated to Inari, the Shinto goddess of the rice-fields, whose shrines are guarded by foxes; the approach to it was under three avenues of small red wooden torii placed closely together, apparently votive offerings, for some of them were old and decayed and others quite bright and new.

At Numadzu, farther to the east on the Tokaido, but still on the shore of Suruga Bay, I again left the train and

followed the course of the old road, from which the railway here diverges, as far as Mishima, and then, after crossing the ridge of mountain which forms the backbone of the Idzu Peninsula, descended to Atami on the western coast of Odawara Bay, a favorite watering-place during the winter months. The orange and banana trees testify to the mildness of its climate, and perhaps the geyser, which every fourth hour squirts out mud and boiling water by the village street, helps to keep up the temperature. Vries Island, with its eternally smoke-capped volcano, lies on the horizon away across the sea, and the natives believe that there is a connection between the two, for whenever Vries is particularly active the geyser discharges more violently.

On the 3d of November I started with a friend from Yokohama to walk over the Ten Province Pass (Jikkoku-toge) to Hakone and Miya-no-shita. It was the Emperor’s birthday, and all Atami was gay with flags; the national ensign with a red ball on a white ground fluttered everywhere. We mounted the steep street, and looked back at the village roofs and the deep blue water of Odawara Bay, and then turned into the woods of old camphor-trees surrounding the temple Ki-no-miya. Some of the camphors are enormous, and the largest of them are encircled with ropes of twisted straw and bunches of gohei, which show that they are sacred objects. Beyond the temple the path ascends, first through rice-fields and then up rough grassy hills, until it reaches the long plateau of turf where the Ten Province stone stands. Though so late in the year, there were still plenty of flowers. Down near Atami long sprays of hototogisu (Tricyrtis), with spotty purple flowers, hung out from the sandy banks, and by our path I saw Michaelmas daisies, golden-rod, dark-blue monk’s-hood, sky-blue gentians, magenta-flowered garlic, thistles of various colors, wild chrysanthemums, pink or white with a gold centre, and the beautiful white stars of the grass of Parnassus. The sun was quite hot, and we pulled out some provisions and sat down on the grass near the stone to enjoy them and the marvellous view. To the north the snowy cone of Fuji rose high against the blue sky; between us and it the long crest of down-land was mostly covered with suzuki (Eulalia japonica), a lovely grass with tall plumes of seed which shine like silver gossamer, and the ranges of lower mountains were brilliant with the autumnal colors of maples and other trees; below us on the east lay the little peninsula of Manazura, jutting out into Sagami Bay, with a curve of rice-fields on each side of the narrow neck which connects it with the mainland, and beyond it the long straight line of the Pacific was broken only by Vries Island and its cloud of smoke; a succession of hilly promontories and little bays stretched all down the coast of Idzu to the southward, and returned northward again up the other side of the peninsula, past Joyama, with a lake-like inlet of sea, to Numadzu, where the great sweep of Suruga Bay began, bordered with sands and sunny rice-fields, and ended only at Kuno-zan, far to the westward. Our path went on along the downs,

through suzuki, dwarf bamboo, and little stunted woods, until a deep descent led us down to the Hakone Lake, dark blue and sombre among its encircling hills; it then mounted once more for a short distance, passed the hot springs of Ashi-no-yu, and finally, while the grassy hills still glowed in the light of the setting sun, brought us down to the Fujiya at Miya-no-shita, where a delicious natural warm bath and a good dinner made a fitting termination to a glorious day.

At the bottom of a ravine almost perpendicularly below Miya-no-shita lies the little village of Dogashima, with a turbulent mountain stream and a very shaky bamboo bridge. The path and steps leading down to it are kept continually green by the overflow from the warm springs, and when I was there they swarmed with land-crabs, queer little beasts with bodies of dark green, blue, brown, or red, and a pair of light-colored claws, which they held up in a threatening attitude when I attempted to catch them. As they heard me approach they scurried off towards their holes, but they were so clumsy and so numerous that I could hardly help stepping on them.

One of the common objects by Japanese road-sides is the figure of Jizo, a Buddhist saint who is the helper of all who are in trouble, and especially the patron of travellers and children. Near the path between Hakone and Ashi-no-yu we passed a colossal presentment of him, carved in bold relief out of a mass of andesite rock, a very striking work of some ancient sculptor. It is said to have been done in a single night by that marvellously active saint Kobo Daishi, who, according to popular tradition, climbed all the mountains in Japan, and found time, when he was not preaching and confounding sceptics, to perform wonders in sculpture, painting, and calligraphy. Jizo, in the rudely carved statuettes by the way-sides, is a benevolent-looking priest, holding a traveller’s staff in his right hand and a globe in his left. He stands on a lotus flower, and around his feet are piled many pebbles, placed there by wayfarers. The reason for the custom is this: On the banks of the So-dzu-kawa, the river of the lower world, there lives a hag who catches little children as they attempt to cross, steals their clothes, and makes them toil with her at her endless task of piling the stones on its shores. Jizo helps these children, and every pebble which is laid at his feet lightens the labor of some little one below. I never passed without adding my contribution, and if I cannot attribute my safety during my wanderings to his kindly aid, at least I am indebted to him for many a pleasant thought, and for the memory of many a lovely landscape or flower seen by his side.