Our dinner party included Hodges, Doctors Sibly and Willes. Willes had taken service with the Japanese. Although he frequently attended those connected with the Court, he had never been allowed near the Mikado. In fact, even now, if necessary to feel the Imperial pulse, a piece of tape is fastened to the wrist and the end is passed through a hole in the wall into the adjoining room when the doctor approaches, beating the mats with his head! The next day (20th) the launch started, soon after high water, with the same party she had brought up, while we waited until Sir Harry Parkes was ready. I was mounted on the Minister’s pet grey Arab charger. Mitford kindly accompanied me part of the way, and cautioned me to be careful of said charger, he having been down once, and getting shaky on his legs. We pulled up by the roadside. There we found a square plot fenced round as sacred, the Mikado having condescended to alight on that place. In another direction a rustic bridge was stopped up, the Imperial foot having passed over it. [Sidenote: Rokugo, Japan, to Yokohama.] The carriage with Parkes and my wife reached the ferry at Rokugo just as I got to the other side. The river is called Tama Gawa (jewel river). We both nearly came to grief; in spite of all Mitford’s caution and my care, the beautiful grey fell, as if shot, in the streets of Yokohama, cutting both knees. Those only who have ridden their friends’ favourite horse, with a similar catastrophe, can understand my feelings. When I broke the fact to Sir Harry, instead of wishing that it had been my neck instead of his horse’s knees, he merely “hoped I had escaped unhurt.” In the carriage they had had a narrow escape: one of the ponies, a bumptious beast, that never neared another animal without apparently wishing to eat it, stopped on meeting a carriage that had pulled up on the narrow raised causeway, on both sides of which there is a drop of some 12 feet into the sea, and that made still more unpleasant by short piles thickly driven in. The beast screamed and backed in spite of the whip, which was dropped into him smartly by the Minister. The mounted orderlies saw the danger. One seized my wife, and the other got hold of the ponies’ heads, only just in time; the adventure did not improve my wife’s nerves. They reached the Legation just before me, having taken a different road. Sunday was the anniversary of the Queen’s Accession, and in church we had the service appointed for that event, finishing with “God save the Queen.” Not at all bad for Yokohama. The _Dupleix_, with our friend Du Petit Thours, went out of harbour as I rode in on Saturday, along the Tikado, and I was much disappointed at not seeing any notice taken of him when the _Dupleix_ passed our ships, she being homeward bound, while their kindness and hospitality to Harry Stephenson and the wrecked crew of the _Rattler_ in September last was fresh in our memories.