of the seventeenth, the work could only be carried on in secluded and out-of-the-way places comparatively free from the ravages of fire and sword. [Illustration: BARON SHIBUSAWA] Under the Tokugawa regime the prosperity of sericulture revived, for the feudal chiefs were anxious to see their people engaged in settled occupations, and recognised the value of this industry in particular. Throughout that region in which Baron Shibusawa spent his boyhood the silkworm is an object of the keenest interest to the people, for everything hinges upon its preservation in a good state of health, and at certain stages of the worm’s existence it is regarded, even at the inns where travellers have to put up for the night when on the road, as a creature whose interests it is necessary to study far more carefully than those of a guest. The “Kaiko-sama” must on no account be disturbed. Shibusawa Eichi received the rudiments of education at his home, and was a close student of history. He read the Chinese classics with a scholar residing in an adjoining village, and helped his father in the manufacture and sale of indigo. By the time he was nineteen years old the cry of Jo-I (Out with the barbarians) which then was being raised in Yedo, little more than a long day’s tramp away from him, had penetrated to the remote village in which he dwelt, and by degrees the whole region grew to be in an uproar. Shibusawa soon betook himself to the capital, to see for himself what it all meant. There he continued his studies under the famous Gyo-son Kai-ho, a classical scholar of repute, and he was a pupil of the no less celebrated fencing master, Chiba Shusaku. From Yedo he travelled to the then seat of learning, Kioto, where he made many friends and finally was received into the Hitotsubashi clan, one of the branches of the Tokugawa family, and from which the last dynasty of Shoguns sprang. The Hitotsubashi branch was that into which the present Prince Tokugawa Keiki, “the last of the Shoguns,” was adopted,—though really a scion of the Mito house—and whose name he bore in the days immediately antecedent to the Restoration of Imperial Rule. The head of the Hitotsubashi house when Shibusawa owned allegiance to it was a very distinguished nobleman, who was instrumental in founding a modernised military system for the Tokugawas and did good service in connection with its finances. Soon afterwards Prince Keiki was called upon to succeed Iyemochi as Shogun at Yedo, and removed thither from Kioto, taking with him Shibusawa Eichi, who became an officer of the Shogunate Government or “Bakufu.” In 1867, the prince Mimbu-taiyu, a younger brother of the Shogun, was sent to France to study Western sciences and institutions, and in his suite was Shibusawa, at that time twenty-seven years of age. The opportunity was one of which he availed himself to the uttermost, and he diligently acquired all the information possible on matters that it