Prince Yōdo, the Inkiyō of Tosa, was a very remarkable man,—remarkable even among the many notable personalities of those stirring times. A Daimio when he resigned his position in favour of his heir and became Inkiyō might divest himself of the pomp and circumstance of princely rank, but he rarely gave up the actual power. Such men as Shimadzu Saburō, of Satsuma, Daté of Uwajima, and Yōdo, all Inkiyō, remained the real governing force in their several clans. The greatest of these was Yōdo, whom we were presently to see. He was a far-seeing man of the highest intelligence, and took a much more statesmanlike view of affairs than the other Daimios. When these were pressing, as I have stated above, for the surrender by the Tokugawa clan of property bringing in two million kokus of rice he saw that such a confiscation would be futile and absurd as the nucleus of a national revenue. He it was who proposed that all the Daimios should surrender their almost regal estates, retaining only a percentage sufficient to maintain a suitable position; he foresaw that the sacrifice would be rather apparent than real, and that, if the Empire were consolidated, they would be more than compensated by being relieved of the necessity of maintaining a whole machinery of government, with military and, in some cases, naval forces. Satsuma and some other Princes jibbed at this in the first instance; they had not Yōdo’s grasp of affairs, and were wedded to what he recognized as a worn-out feudal system. In the end they had to yield and Yōdo’s wisdom won the day. Yōdo, like some of our own statesmen of a generation little more than fifty years before his time, had been a very free liver. In his youth he had a seal engraved with the device, “The drunken Daimio of the Southern Seas.” His excesses had been notorious, and he was now paying his shot. We found the old _viveur_—old not in years—lying on the mats in the midst of a pile of quilts and coverlets decked with beautiful purple crape, a cloud of strong colour contrasting sharply with the waxen mask and hands of the sick man. At his head was his wife, an elderly lady with her eyebrows shaven and her teeth lacquered black,[6] ministering to his wants, and behind him sat his last and favourite young lady, a pretty little girl hardly more than a child, with her hands under a corner of the quilt, for the poor little soul was very cold. She had her teeth and eyebrows left as nature had given them to her, with no disfigurement inflicted by the tyranny of fashion. She seemed at first to be very shy and abashed at the presence of the inauspicious and monstrous foreigners. The ex-Prince had the most exquisite manners, all the courtesy which to a Japanese gentleman of high rank is second nature.