and he says that them blanketed consuls ought to know.  ’They plays into each other’s hands, and stops you at the Hatoba’—­the policemen do.  The visitor who is neither a seaman nor drunk, cannot swear to the truth of this, or indeed anything else.  He moves not only among fascinating scenes and a lovely people but, as he is sure to find out before he has been a day ashore, between stormy questions.  Three years ago there were no questions that were not going to be settled off-hand in a blaze of paper lanterns.  The Constitution was new.  It has a gray, pale cover with a chrysanthemum at the back, and a Japanese told me then, ’Now we have Constitution same as other countries, and so it is all right.  Now we are quite civilised because of Constitution.’

[A perfectly irrelevant story comes to mind here.  Do you know that in Madeira once they had a revolution which lasted just long enough for the national poet to compose a national anthem, and then was put down?  All that is left of the revolt now is the song that you hear on the twangling nachettes, the baby-banjoes, of a moonlight night under the banana fronds at the back of Funchal.  And the high-pitched nasal refrain of it is ‘Consti-tuci-oun!’]

Since that auspicious date it seems that the questions have impertinently come up, and the first and the last of them is that of Treaty Revision.  Says the Japanese Government, ’Only obey our laws, our new laws that we have carefully compiled from all the wisdom of the West, and you shall go up country as you please and trade where you will, instead of living cooped up in concessions and being judged by consuls.  Treat us as you would treat France or Germany, and we will treat you as our own subjects.’

Here, as you know, the matter rests between the two thousand foreigners and the forty million Japanese—­a God-send to all editors of Tokio and Yokohama, and the despair of the newly arrived in whose nose, remember, is the smell of the East, One and Indivisible, Immemorial, Eternal, and, above all, Instructive.

Indeed, it is only by walking out at least half a mile that you escape from the aggressive evidences of civilisation, and come out into the rice-fields at the back of the town.  Here men with twists of blue and white cloth round their heads are working knee deep in the thick black mud.  The largest field may be something less than two tablecloths, while the smallest is, say, a speck of undercliff, on to which it were hard to back a ’rickshaw, wrested from the beach and growing its clump of barley within spray-shot of the waves.  The field paths are the trodden tops of the irrigating cuts, and the main roads as wide as two perambulators abreast.  From the uplands—­the beautiful uplands planted in exactly the proper places with pine and maple—­the ground comes down in terraced pocket on pocket of rich earth to the levels again, and it would seem that every heavily-thatched farmhouse was chosen with