As an illustration of the amicable relations which had by this time grown up between the Japanese authorities and foreigners, it may be related how, on the 21st of March 1866, 800 samurai troops, under the command of Kubota Sentaro, marched out of Yokohama in company with the British from the camp on the Bluff for a field day in the country towards Kamakura. The Japanese soldiers who thus for the first time in the history of the two nations bore their part in an Anglo-Japanese Alliance were men belonging to the Shogun’s forces, and their officers had acquired a knowledge of Western drill from their studies at the British camp, under the guidance of the officers of the Lancashire Fusiliers, then forming the garrison of the Yokohama foreign settlement. Less than two years before the Shogun’s troops had participated in similar manœuvres, but only to a very slight degree, as at that time the Japanese had been armed with the bow and arrow and wore chain armour, in the ancient style. Two years’ drill had made the Shogun’s men so efficient that their shooting with the rifle astonished the British spectators by its rapidity, and by the ease with which the men handled their weapons, comparatively unaccustomed as they undoubtedly then were to modern firearms. Among those who were in this way the pioneers of the Japanese modern military organisation were many personal friends of the first Ambassador to the Court of St James, Viscount Hayashi. In August 1866, the Shogun Iyemochi, whose health had for a long time past been failing, died at Osaka, his end having been accelerated, it is beyond doubt, by the vicissitudes of the last year or two, and the effort demanded of him when personally taking the field at the head of his army against the troops of the contumacious lord of Choshiu. Notwithstanding the fast-growing power of the Shogunate’s political adversaries, the moment was scarcely fitting for attempting its entire overthrow, and in December of that year the Shogun Keiki, seventh son of the prince of Mito, a branch of the Tokugawa family, and adopted son of the Hitotsubashi family—_i.e._ the Owari branch of the same Tokugawa house—was duly invested with all the dignities of his exalted office. He had been nominated Shogun, as already explained, in 1858, by the then prince of Mito his father, but had been passed over owing to the strenuous opposition of the Regent, whose hostility to the Mito prince Nari-aki has been alluded to, and its effects described.