Late in 1869 the Emperor was joined at Tokio by the young Empress Haruko, who travelled overland by the highroad termed the Tokaido, with an immense retinue, resting on the way at the prescribed _honjins_ or private hotels used by the feudal lords on their former journeys to and from Yedo, when the Shoguns required them to pay periodical visits to the headquarters of the Tokugawa government. The Empress was some weeks on the road from Kioto to Tokio, and as her procession passed through the street of Kanagawa, near Yokohama, the foreign residents took the opportunity to assemble at the wayside and show their respect for the Ten-shi’s consort. They did not catch a glimpse of her features, but they knew that behind the gauze-screened windows of her lacquered palanquin sat the highest lady of the land, perhaps as much interested in her first sight of the strangers from the west as they were with the various elements of the imperial cortege. Though her majesty had heard and read much of the characteristics of the Occidentals, she had never previously seen any of them; in after years, however, her own beneficent impulses in the cause of charity led her to receive on many occasions the wives and daughters of foreign residents and contributed to the establishment of an enduring fame as the strenuous advocate and supporter of all good works. The Emperor was but little in evidence in the early years of his reign, and it was an event in the history of the nation when the monarch who had been brought up in such strict seclusion was one day seen in the streets of his capital driving in an open carriage to Hama-go-ten, the beach palace in the suburbs of Tokio, in company with his Ministers the Princes Sanjo and Iwakura. On this occasion he had done them the supreme honour of calling for them at their residences and conveying them in his own carriage to a ceremony in which they were both deeply concerned. This was on the 1st of October 1871, and it is difficult to estimate at its true value the extraordinary effect which so graceful an act on the part of the monarch who had only four years before succeeded to a dignity which seemed to impose on him an existence of absolute invisibility to his subjects must have had on those who were witnesses of this vast concession to modernised ideas. Under the old regime the princes would themselves have been hidden from the vulgar gaze by the latticed windows of their sedan chairs, and the sovereign would never have been seen outside his own palace walls.