prince’s retainers over his person,—it is easy to picture the position, knowing as we now do, how exceedingly strict was it needful to be in those stormy days of frequent assassination and widespread feuds,—and in the end the imperial courier had to return to Kioto with his task unfulfilled. Saigo and others opposed to the Bakufu became marked men, but the dread of Satsuma’s vengeance protected them from actual arrest. Gessho also was suspected, and for his safety Saigo resolved to take the priest with him to the south. The priest rode in a palanquin, and Saigo, assisted by a fellow-clansman named Umeda, acted as escort. They were not attacked, though they fully apprehended that they would be, and reached Kagoshima in safety. Saigo acquainted his clansmen with what he had done, but the explanation was coldly received. At this time his opposition to the Bakufu was not shared by the officers of the Satsuma province. Gessho’s hiding-place was soon discovered, and he was in danger, and Saigo went at midnight to the place where he had secreted his friend to warn him. Together they resolved to drown themselves in the bay of Kagoshima, for Saigo, perceiving that the priest’s death was inevitable, deemed it a point of honour to die with him, in despair at the absence of a true chivalric spirit in the clan. They actually threw themselves into the sea, but the act had been observed, and some boatmen recovered the bodies from the waves in time to resuscitate Saigo, though Gessho had expired. The provincial officers were wrathful at the stigma cast on the clan’s hospitality by Gessho’s death, and also at Saigo’s uncompromising hostility to the Shogunate, and they banished him to the island of Oshima, some distance from the Satsuma coast. Here he changed his name to Oshima Sanyemon, the reference in the second word being to the circumstance that this was his third visit to the islet, his previous banishments having been the fruits of similar opposition to the Bakufu, and the result moreover of his being appreciably in advance of the times. It was not long before the entire clan was united with Saigo in his unswerving hostility to the Yedo Government, but meanwhile he suffered for his temerity. On Oshima he studied incessantly, when one not of his indomitable spirit might have broken down under a sense of disappointment and the conviction of wrongs sustained without hope of remedy. His feudal chieftain pardoned him after the expiration of four years, and Saigo returned to Satsuma and became one of the clan officials. When the Shogunate entered into the treaties with foreign powers Saigo opposed it with all the resolution of his unbending character, and during the conflicts which ensued at Kioto he sheltered many who were pursued by the Yedo Government’s officers and helped them to escape. He it was who strongly favoured a reconciliation between his clan and Choshiu and advocated their coalition in opposition to the Bakufu.