August 22nd at 5.30 a.m. we were in sight of the glorious old Castle of Ōsaka, and landing at six, took up our quarters in our old temple in the Nakadéramachi. So our venturesome eleven days’ journey came to an end; it had been intensely interesting and exciting. We never knew what might happen; when we lay down at night we blessed our luck that there had been no mischance, and when the morning came we pinched ourselves to see whether we were really still alive: there were so many wandering anti-foreign fanatics throughout the country, against whom even our kind Kaga friends could not have protected us! However, it all ended well, and we were successful in gaining all the information that our chief wanted. Unfortunately the interest of our expedition paled before a tragedy. For at five Sir Harry Parkes arrived with the news of the cruel murder of two bluejackets of H.M.S. _Icarus_. They had been literally hacked to pieces by a party of brawling Samurai. These poor fellows’ fate brought home to us the danger to which we had so nearly fallen victims. This murder led to endless interviews and discussions, which were complicated by the fact that our people were on the wrong tack. There was a suspicion that the murderers were Samurai of the Tosa clan—a suspicion born of the fact that a small steamer and a sailing vessel belonging to Tosa had slipped secretly out of Nagasaki harbour before daylight on the morning after the crime had been committed. It was afterwards proved that they belonged to a quite different clan, which was duly punished later. But the chief murderer had previously committed suicide by _hara-kiri_. The discussions served to make us better acquainted and increased our respect for Gotō Shōjirō, who represented his Prince and who proved himself to be a man of first-rate ability, quite able to hold his own against our rather peppery chief—not an easy man to discuss matters with. He turned out to be one of the three or four ablest men who engineered the revolution. Like the famous Saigo, of Satsuma, and others of the leaders in the various clans, Gotō expressed himself as keenly anxious to establish a Gi-ji-in, or parliament. That did not come about until some eighteen months later, and when it did ripen into being it turned out to be a very embryonic affair. Mercifully for Japan, speech-making had never played the same part in her public life that it has done in some other countries, and the Parliament started more like a debating society in a public school than a grave assembly of legislators, which, as a matter of fact, they were not. They might register their opinions, but they could not enact laws.