in 1605, he really ruled in his son’s name, and retained the executive power in his own hands. His ostensible retirement was due to his desire for leisure to frame his system of laws for the better government of the empire, and he drew up a scheme for the effective subordination of the provincial dai-mios, or feudatories, to the ruling authority at Yedo, which remained in force until the Restoration of direct sovereign rule, in 1868. The Shogun Iyeyasu was descended from the Minamoto family, and the name Toku-gawa, _lit._: stream of blessings, is said to have been taken from a river and village of the same name in the province of Shimo-tsuke, and not far from the celebrated Nikko Shrines. On the banks of the little Tokugawa the Shogun’s ancestors had dwelt, as farmers, for centuries, but the father of Iyeyasu,—Toku-gawa Shiro,—lived in the village of Matsudaira, in the province of Mikawa, which borders on the Pacific, about midway between Kobé and Yokohama. Here the “Law-giver” was born in 1542, the year that the Portuguese voyager, Mendez Pinto, first set foot on the soil of Japan. Iyeyasu fought under Nobunaga, and Hideyoshi, and ultimately succeeded the renowned Tai-ko Sama in the supreme command of the military forces, occupying thereafter the position of Sei-I-Tai-Sho-Gun. Iyeyasu first acquired property in his native province of Mikawa, and all his early associations were with that region, so much so that his opponents in after years were accustomed to allude to him somewhat slightingly as the “man from Mikawa.” When Iyeyasu obtained the position of Shogun in 1603 he elevated his birthplace to a position of honour by conferring its name as an extra title on many of his supporters, and down to the date of the abolition of such territorial distinctions there were not a few prominent dai-mios who thus preserved their connection with the Tokugawa regime from the beginning of its supremacy. The traces were to be found in titles such as “Nabeshima Matsudaira Hizen no Kami”—the baron Nabeshima Matsudaira of Hizen province,—Kuroda Matsudaira the dai-mio of Chikuzen,—and a host of others. In accord with the plans formulated by Tokugawa Iyeyasu every one among the number, some 300 in all, of the provincial barons was personally required to spend a moiety of each year in residence at his Yashiki in Yedo, and to leave his family there for the other six months,—the Yashikis being town mansions dotted about the capital in which a semi-regal state was kept up, and where the barons were surrounded by hundreds of their own retainers, ready to do their chieftain’s bidding on the instant. The remnants of these mansions are still to be found in modern Tokio, but they were in great part utilised, on the Restoration of Imperial rule, as Government offices and barracks for the troops of the army then about to be formed on Western lines. One of the most remarkable of these mansions of Old Yedo was that