Kanagawa, a long straggling village on the Tocaido or great road, has always been a hotbed of disaffection towards foreigners. Many a bloody record still tells of the days when the proud 'Samourai' or officers felt that they were scarcely doing their duty towards their country in allowing a European to pass unmolested on the road; and even now, though feudalism, Samourai, and all have been swept away by the march of civilisation, one cannot ride or walk along the narrow street without being saluted as a 'beast' or 'foreign invader.' The temples which were the first residences of the foreign consuls still exist, but the natives have carefully wiped away all traces of foreign occupation, and they are now used, as formerly, for purposes of Buddhist or 'Shinto' worship. From Kanagawa the railway passes under the great road, and enters a broad fertile plain ablaze with many tinted crops, fringed on the left hand by a picturesque range of hills, and bounded on the right by the sea. The peasants are becoming accustomed to the sight of the locomotive and its string of carriages, and rarely stop on their path or rest from their work to gaze at what was but a few months back a wonderful phenomenon. But the pack-horses are less tractable, and dance and pirouette in all directions till the noise is over. Tsurumi, a little village, also on the Tocaido, is the next station. It is the centre of the snipe district, and on Saturdays and Sundays the little platform is crowded with knickerbockered Britons with their dogs; Frenchmen, fantastically arrayed in sporting costume; Israelites; sailors and soldiers from the men-of-war in harbour, armed with every variety of rifle, musket, or blunderbuss, all bent on wading through the 'paddy' mud in the hopes of making some sort of a bag. From Tsurumi, the train glides through a delicious stretch of scenery--on the one side little villages nestle amidst the trees, and the deep blue ocean glitters away into the distance; on the other, all is a romantic jumble of hill, and wood, and dale. Here and there a red temple roof breaks the sombre verdure of the hill-side, and at a certain point a depression of the hills affords the traveller a peep at the distant goblin-haunted range of mountains of which Oyama is the chief, behind which the pure white cone of the sacred mountain Fuji rises, solitary and grand, like a monarch in repose. All around is pure unadulterated rusticity. The iron road cuts remorselessly through pleasant vales and wooded hills, but nothing is changed; and if the visitor will take the trouble to explore on either side, he will find the old-world life of Japan still existing as it did centuries ago, when the only Europeans in the land were a few Portuguese missionaries and a small colony of Dutch traders cooped up in an island at Nagasaki.