Nor was it any the less luck that Maido was there, for only his intense patriotism caused the lord daimyo, in the uncertain absence of his son, to quit his comfortable Kanazawa place and repair thus early to the Tokyo castle. It was an unusual thing for him to take up his residence at the capital city before late in the autumn, though in point of elegance and diversion of thought the latter home far surpassed the former. This, the largest and oldest of the several daimyos' castles at Tokyo, stood inside the second and just outside the inner moat which surrounded the palace. The grounds were spacious, and lay to the left of the main driveway, going toward the palace, close up against the inner moat. Indeed, it was the choice of a gentle slope which fringed the hill, rising on the opposite side of the moat, within the sacred enclosure above. A high stone battlement, battered and overgrown, stood sentinel at the water's edge, and all around giant cypress and strange foliage told of another day. Here, in this place, was builded the official seat of one man, a daimyo, now Maido, who was the most favoured and courted at a shogun's court, and who commanded the wealth, the intellect, and the aspiration of a thousand years of unbroken, unknown, and unsatisfied progress. Its environment spoke for the present; its tombs, of the past. To this place, with such circumstances, Shibusawa was carried, and for the first time in his life entered there; a coming hoped and looked for, an ambition cherished and nursed by his father until it had become his constant dream; and yet that coming was to be when the spark of life seemed all but dead. Maido hastened to the family shrine and there prayed the good god Dajiza to grant him power to ward off death's evil hand. Shibusawa's rooms were at the upper side of the main court building (a rambling red-lacquered structure, with curled tile roof) overlooking the greensward and battlement, toward where Kinsan's cottage nestled in the nearby woodland. Here he lay for a long time, battling against death, till science and care had overcome danger, then his vigorous constitution rapidly brought on a complete and permanent recovery. While convalescing he would often sit chatting with his father, or dreaming of things now fast crowding upon him: the poverty and the toil; the suffering and the patriotism; the dormant power and the helplessness of the people which he had everywhere seen; his own new-born love; the ruthless force of an officer--all these were weighing heavily upon his young conscience, which already flamed with ambition.