All these things, however, took place months after my arrival in Yedo. The great city through which the furies had been raging so violently, burning temples, setting fire to _yashikis_, fighting, murdering, crucifying,[12] the streets ringing with the fierce war-songs of the clansmen, was now at peace. The days floated by uneventfully in a dull monotone which was a new and, to tell the truth, delicious sensation; it was long since I had enjoyed such a feeling of peace and security. Now and then some visitor would come, eager to be shown the historic beauties of the famous place; now and then I had to ride to Yokohama on Legation business; otherwise the silence of Monriuin was unbroken. It was a blessed calm after the storm. Still, it would not have been wise as yet to lay aside revolver and sword, for so long as the Samurai were allowed to wear sword and dirk there was always the danger lest some fanatic swashbuckler, perhaps in his cups, might empty his scabbard in our honour. A blow would soon be given, and we had had experience enough of what Captain du Petit Thouars called “le marteau rasoir”—a good definition of the heavily-weighted, keen-edged _katana_. The law depriving the Samurai of the right to carry the _dai-sho_, sword and dirk, was one of the wisest enactments of the new _régime_, but that was not to come for many a long month. CHAPTER XXV BETWIXT OLD AND NEW JAPAN The period upon which we were now entering was of singular interest and historical importance. It was the connecting link between the old Japan and the new, a transition-time in which the ancient feudalism still spoke (indeed, one may ask whether its voice is even now, in 1915, quite hushed to silence?) when many schemes were fought out, some still-born, some doomed to a swift death, others, embryonic at first, but fated to grow into greatness. Of these none was more significant, none more pregnant with consequences than the remission by the Daimios into the hands of the Mikado of the great fiefs which they had held from time immemorial. This, as I have shown, sprang out of the proposal of the Daimios that the Tokugawa family should be made to give up lands bringing in a revenue of two millions _kokus_ of rice; and it was to that remarkable man, my friend Prince Yōdo, the Inkiyō of Tosa, that the credit belongs of seeing that, having once started on a forward policy, they must be prepared to go on with it, and that the consolidation of the Empire must of necessity involve the creation of an Imperial revenue, together with the abolition of provincial home rule. At the same time no little praise is due to the other territorial magnates for the ease and rapidity with which they assimilated what to them must have seemed profoundly distasteful and revolutionary ideas. [Illustration: OLD JAPAN. _From a water-colour drawing by C. Wirgman._]