February 3rd.—We had news from Kiōto to the effect that the Satsuma and Daimios party regretted our having left Ōsaka, where they stated that they could have guaranteed our safety. However, the trick was done, and there was plenty of work to keep us at Hiōgo. The clansmen told us that the Tycoon had received orders to invite the Foreign Ministers to an audience of the Mikado at Kiōto. This invitation was never delivered, having been burked at the instigation of our good colleague, M. Léon Roches, whose great object it was, hoping against hope, to bolster up the Tycoon, without whom all his schemes for monopolies would of necessity miscarry; so he never ceased throwing obstacles in the way of the acknowledgment of the Mikado’s sovereign state. With the restoration to power of the true Emperor the influence which he had been at such pains to build up must tumble to pieces; it was a house built upon foundations as unstable as the shifting sand. In his intrigues to keep back the invitation to Kiōto M. Roches’ action was both vain and foolish. Vain, because it did not and could not retard the visit to Kiōto by one hour, and foolish, in that it was bound to break the eleventh commandment. Established at Hiōgo we were under the impression that we might now in peace set about our business and go on with the first steps for the opening of two ports. Never were men more deluded. We had avoided the Scylla of Ōsaka, where, as we now knew, we should have been perfectly safe, and had steered into the Charybdis of Hiōgo, where we were within a few hours to undergo an experience which, by the merest luck, did not end in a general massacre of the whole of the Foreign Representatives, together with numbers of Consuls and subjects of various nations, and which did end in a tragedy, gruesome and of haunting memory. On the 4th of February, about two in the afternoon, the Foreign Ministers were busily employed upon the land at Kōbé, which had been assigned as a foreign settlement, when a regiment of men of the Bizen clan, coming out of the gate of Hiōgo, halted at the word of command and opened a murderous fire upon the foreigners. Happily they did not understand the sights of their rifles, which, as it subsequently appeared, they had recently received from America. They fired upon the principle laid down, according to my old friend Lord Dorchester’s story, by one of his sergeants in the trenches before Sevastopol. A Russian head appeared above the battlements of the town. “What’ll I give him?” asked a private of the Coldstream Guards. “Give the beggar a thousand yards and make sure of him!” Several volleys were fired. Sir Harry Parkes and Captain Stanhope were in the thick of it. All the other Ministers and many people were under fire. Mercifully only one American sailor lad of the _Oneida_ was slightly wounded.