benefit the landlord, as he is quick to perceive, of the restaurant to which she may choose to attach herself, and if she should be summoned to a house or to take part in an entertainment to which she does not care to go, she is at perfect liberty to decline the invitation. Anything less resembling the life of slavery that it is sometimes represented to be it would be difficult to imagine. Her singing and dancing are usually remunerated at a fixed price per half-hour, varying according to her status as an accomplished entertainer, and she is not infrequently called upon to display her abilities to a party composed exclusively of ladies, whose wish it may be, like that of the other sex, to beguile the tedium of a winter evening by her witty conversation and her skill in music. Finally it must be added that a geisha of good repute is more sought after than one whose morality is deemed to be somewhat lax. In any case her character is always known to the police, for it is the rule that she must take out a licence as an entertainer, and the Chief Superintendent of the Section, in handing the document to her, commonly adds some words of fatherly admonition to avoid the many pitfalls that of necessity lie in her path. The nation once more experienced the miseries of civil strife towards the close of the sixteenth century, this time by reason of the introduction of a religion which differed from that which had been dominant in Japan for twenty-three centuries, and likewise from that Buddhism which had found its way eastward 1000 years before from India. The Portuguese had obtained the right, under the Ashikaga rule, to settle in Japan, and in 1542 they brought with them,—what were altogether strange at that time to the Ten-shi’s people,—firearms, and the doctrines of the Roman Catholic faith. The keen desire manifested by the Jesuits to make proselytes speedily provoked the antagonism of the Buddhist and Shinto priesthoods, but, as was the case in China, the climax seems to have been reached only with the assumption by the new-comers of political power. To such pretensions the ruling house at Yedo could but oppose all its strength, and the patriotism of the country asserted itself in the form of a persecution that left no stone unturned in the effort to rid the land of a direct menace to its existence as an independent monarchy, secure from the influences of the Church of Rome. But the expulsion of the visitors was not accomplished until many years after the supremacy of the Ashikaga line had been successfully challenged by Nobunaga, and to the renowned Hideyoshi,—the Taiko-sama, or Great general,—had succeeded the scarcely less famous Iyeyasu, “the Law-giver,” who founded the Toku-gawa dynasty of Shoguns, and himself to all intents and purposes governed the country, from his accession in 1603 to the post of Sei-I-Tai-Sho-Gun, to his death in 1616, for though nominally he gave way to his third son, Hidetada,