There he found them making moderator lamps, and farther on there was a forge-factory in complete working order, with a Nasmyth’s hammer. “And here we saw one of the most extraordinary and crowning testimonies of Japanese enterprise and ingenuity, which leaves all the Chinese have ever attempted far behind. I allude to a steam-engine with tubular boilers, made by themselves before a steam vessel or engine had ever been seen by Japanese—made solely, therefore, from the plans in a Dutch work.” After this we do not think that the idea which our author ridicules, of the possibility of railways and steam communication in Japan, is so very absurd; considering all that he has undergone, it is not to be wondered at that he should occasionally take a gloomy view of the people and the country. Generally he is sanguine and complimentary, and nobody has had better opportunities of judging. He has visited the northern island, ascended Fusama, spent some weeks at a Japanese watering-place, where he found “peace, plenty, apparent content, and a country more perfectly and carefully cultivated, and kept with more ornamental timber everywhere, than can be matched even in England.” He made an overland journey from Nagasaki to Yedo, which lasted thirty-three days, and the incidents of which form one of the most interesting features of the book. There is an admirable description of a Japanese play, which, judged by the light of the future, seemed to be a rehearsal of the tragedy about to be perpetrated a fortnight later on Sir Rutherford himself. Occasionally the party traversed the territory of a hostile daimio; on these occasions the inhabitants shut themselves up. Thus, at Nieno, a daimio’s capital— “As we advanced through the streets we found every house and every side-street hermetically closed, not a whisper was to be heard, nor the face of a living being to be seen. The side streets were all barricaded and shut out of view by curtains spread on high poles. His own house, which we passed, was similarly masked by curtains. Even in the adjoining villages no women or children were to be seen.” These daimios are always followed by large bodies of armed retainers in their journeys through the country, and, as the last murder of our countryman proves, are not to be met without danger. On one occasion, says our author, “Mr De Wit and I were riding abreast, and without any escort, having left them far behind, when, seeing rather a large cortege filling up the road as we turned an angle, we drew to one side of the road in single file. No sooner did the leading officer observe the movement than he instantly began to swagger, and motioned all the train to spread themselves over the whole road; so that all we gained by our consideration and courtesy was to run the risk of being pushed into the ditch by an insolent subordinate.”