When we reached Ōsaka two days later, Noguchi, Satow’s Samurai attendant, went to a tea-house in the city in which he overheard a party of men belonging to the Tosa clan, in a compartment separated from him by a paper screen, telling of their disappointment at having the day before missed the chance of murdering the two foreigners who were defiling the neighbourhood of the sacred city. It appeared that a band of four hundred men of the Tosa, Satsuma and Chōshiu clans had gone out to Ōtsu to lie in wait for us. Had we taken the route which we proposed, through Ōtsu, we should have been dead men. It was a narrow escape; a very near thing! The fun of the thing was that the Japanese officials, in persuading us to change our route, had not the remotest suspicion of what they were saving us from. Weeks afterwards I heard the whole story confirmed by Gotō Shōjirō. He was at the time _rusui_, or agent in charge of the _yashiki_ (palace) of the Prince of Tosa at Kiōto, and heard of the plot which he did all in his power to stop. But his men broke out of the _yashiki_, determined to wreak their hatred of foreigners on us. Gotō’s name must appear often in these recollections; he became one of my best friends in Japan, and risked his own life in the attack upon the Legation, when we were on our way to the Mikado’s Court in the following year—as I shall presently relate. August 21st.—We left Kusatsu at 5.45 a.m. The heat was appalling; what with mosquitoes and discussions we had had but scanty sleep; moreover we had for the last day or two had little food, save rice with tea, of which we could not eat our fill, for the condiments with which the Japanese encourage their appetite for rice were as salt as brine, and to us impossible. Partly by river, and partly on the tramp, stopping every now and then to wash out our mouths, through beautiful scenery with a glorious view of the great plain in which lie Kiōto and Fushimi—the place of the thrilling memories of the civil war—we reached Uji at four o’clock, very much done up with the heat and very tired. As for the famous Temple of Ishiyama, which was to be the reward of our listening to the blandishments of our friends of the night before, it had been hermetically sealed to us, and all our knocking at the door brought no answer. Seven years afterwards, on board a steamer in the Pacific, I met a Japanese gentleman who had been present and had watched our discomfiture and vain knockings. We bought a little tea at Uji, as a matter of course; and at six o’clock got into a comfortable houseboat in which we drifted down the stream, resting and looking back upon the entrancing view. Toward morning we fell asleep.