The houses on shore progressed, and were being built without any palisade enclosure, as had been agreed on. On the 4th of March we had a slight fall of snow, and the air was cool. The Japanese, with the ships’ casks, brought off in their boats, from some place of their river, water to fill our tanks. They brought two kinds, and desired us to choose between them. Everything in Japan having any connection with strangers, is deemed a matter of such importance, that the water-boats were always accompanied by others with municipal officials. They were entertained with cakes and tea and wine; and were quite curious in examining each portion of the ship. They did not understand why we should have brought so many vessels. They told us that the Russian squadron had been at Nangasaki, and left there on the 12th of February. At that time they declared their intention of making a treaty with the “American States” alone. They would present their fans on which they desired some sentiment to be written, and many of them took away the marginal aphorisms of a pocket-dictionary. Their own cards were presented, written perpendicularly on strips of paper, such as Mr. Olee-ke-chay-suo, or Mr. To-ta-ro-sa-koo-ka. They were very polite in writing names in Japanese characters in our books. I requested one to write a name on the title-page of a Book of Common Prayer, which happened to have a steel engraving of the cross upon it. He had dipped his camel’s-hair pencil into his portable inkstand, passed the point through his lips, and was about to write when his eye rested upon the cross; he instantly shook his head, threw the book upon the table, nor could he be induced to touch it again. Some of the officers who visited the shore near the buildings, brought flowered branches of the wild Camellia Japonica, which is native here. Upon being put on the table near a stove, they sent forth a pleasant perfume. The leaf here is of the deepest and most lovely green; but the flower, though as large, had not the same delicacy of petal—perhaps owing to exposure to the cold winds—as the same flower, after hot-house nurture, in the United States. On the 6th of March a mariner died on the Mississippi of an affection of the brain. The sloop-of-war Saratoga, after a boisterous passage from Shanghae, and being blown off from the mouth of the bay of Yedo, arrived and anchored in the line. This dropping in of the ships and the subsequent arrival of another, the Japanese did not understand, and perhaps thought with Macbeth:— “Will the line stretch out to the crack o’doom.”