the circumstance that Saris thought well to remain at Bantam until the beginning of the following year, knowing all the while that he bore a letter from King James to the Emperor of Japan. He sailed in the _Clove_ with a crew of seventy, and sighting the coast near Nagasaki, he, two days later, anchored in the haven of Firando. Here Adams met him and arranged for a visit to the Shogun, who was then at Sumpu. Thither they repaired, accompanied by a Japanese interpreter and two followers. They carried with them presents to the value of 720 dollars for Iyeyasu and the State officers. They started on their journey on the 7th of August, and arrived at their destination on the 6th of September. On the 8th they had an audience of the Shogun, to whom they delivered the English King’s letter for the Emperor. They were graciously received, and Iyeyasu in return sent to King James five screens and a letter for His Majesty, conveying a free licence to English subjects to enter any of the ports of Japan for trade purposes. Thus was established in the year 1613 the first treaty of commerce between England and Japan. In the midst of all these things our hero had met with a fair damsel in Japan with whom he mated, and who bore him a son and a daughter—Joseph and Susanna. And, to complete the romance, we are told that there are to-day Japanese who pride themselves on being able to trace their descent from this Elizabethan mariner whom the greatest of their Shoguns loved to honour.[5] In Japan, however, as in other countries into which the Indian weed had been introduced, it was not allowed to take root and flourish unopposed. Protests, strong and loud, were got up by the old-fashioned folk against the new-fangled indulgence from the ‘Nanban’—country of the southern barbarians. So strenuously did they proclaim it to be the ‘fool’s plant,’ the ‘poverty weed,’ the ‘barbarian’s herb,’ that at last they won over the Shogun to their side. In 1612 he issued an edict forbidding his subjects to either use tobacco or to plant seeds of it. It is curious to notice how, in this remote region, the witchery of the weed set good men and true warring over its virtues or vices on exactly the same lines as were being fought over at the same time in England, and in each case with a precisely similar result. Like the historic _Counterblaste_ of our British Solomon and the fulminations of two popes, their efforts to put out the pipe were unavailing. Indeed, as usually happens in conflicts of the kind, opposition begat opposition, till at last the will of the many triumphed over the prejudice and power of the few. The people had tasted the forbidden leaf and liked it so well that each offered to share with his neighbour the pleasure and, if need be, the punishment attached to the indulgence. So in course of time the edict died a natural death, and was decently buried under a mild ceremonial wherein the Shogun enjoined