About two o’clock in the day we came upon a large urban Buddhist temple. The grounds around were quite extensive and well cultivated. You entered them under a number of steep-roofed gateways, guarded by a number of little stone-lieutenants to Buddha, who seemed to be armed with besoms to sweep away evil spirits when they should visit the premises at the pale glimpses of the moon. The building was larger than any I had seen in Simoda. The interior being unsealed overhead, you could look up through rough hewn timbers to the thatching of the roof. The floors, brightly polished, were covered with a white dust, as if the building was neighbor to a flour-mill. The grain of the wood of the large unpolished columns around the altar, was very beautiful. Buddhas in any number were around the room. Black barrel-shaped “tom-toms” were in the middle of the floor, the beating on which, by the shiny-headed priests, is intended to attract the attention of their divinities to their worship, as a daguerreotypist in taking your picture first tells you, “Now it commences.” On one side of the main entrance there was a native inscription: “The laws are ever revolving;” on the other, “The period of Buddha is near: remember it.” To the beams inside were pasted a number of strips of white paper, which when blank are called _gohir_, and intended as emblems of purity; and when written upon, according to some, are inscribed with moral and religious sentences. Those that I noticed were covered with Japanese characters, which I was told were the names of those buried in an adjoining cemetery, for whom mass had been performed. In the cemetery near by were a great number of tombs—little square stone columns very close together, because their dead were buried in a sitting posture. On all of these you saw a compound character, meaning “Returned to vacuity,” and underneath the inscription told that Leu-tah-churo, or somebody else, had gone to nothingness, in such a year of the reign of _Tairi_. Eight lascivious-looking priests resided at the temple, having the receipts from the _kunqua_ attached, as a part of their revenue. The hour of the day having arrived, when that tocsin of man’s soul, the dinner-bell, would have been heard, if at home, we seated ourselves on the front steps of the temple to partake of a little “chow-chow.” While thus engaged the incidents of the morning came to my recollection, and I handed over my epistle “_extraordinaire_,” which I had gotten from the two Japanese, to my friend our interpreter, to get an inkling of what it was all about, at the same time giving him my surmises as to its contents. It was of much more import; he thought the commodore should see it, promising to return it to me. As there were a number around us, no doubt indulging in the Japanese espionage, I only got at the time, the superscription, which was: “A secret communication, for the American men-of-war ships, to go up higher.”