according to the most liberal fashionable allowances, in dispensing with all the misty suggestions of laces to the utmost extent artists could ask, for the study of figures.  Beauty had the advantage of the fine curves of full inhalations of the air that circulated along the dusty paths between the sea and the mountains.  It is a puzzle that the artists of Japan have not better improved the unparalleled privilege of field and wall sketching, that they enjoy to a degree not equalled within the permission of the conventional construction of that which is becoming in the absence of the daylight habilaments of any great and polite people.  The art schools of Japan, out of doors, on the highway, even, cannot fail to produce atmospheric influences of which the world will have visions hereafter, and the Latin quarter of Paris will lose its reputation that attracts and adjusts nature to inspiration.

When we had succeeded, at Kobe, in convincing the authorities that none of the passengers on the China had picked up the plague at Hongkong, we put out into the big sea, and shaped our course for the fairer land so far away, not exactly a straight line, for the convexity of the earth that includes the water, for the ocean—­particularly the Pacific—­is rounded so that the straightest line over its surface is a curved line, if astronomically mentioned.  We struck out on the great Northern circle, purposing to run as high as the forty-eighth parallel, almost to our Alutian Islands, and pursued our course in full view, the bald cliffs of Japan changing their color with the going down of the sun.  When morning came the purple bulk of the bestirring little empire still reminded us of the lights and shadows of Asia and the missionary labors of Sir Edwin Arnold, which have a flavor of the classics and a remembrance of the Scriptures.  “Yonder,” said the Captain, “is the famous mountain of Japan, Fugeyana.  It is not very clearly seen, for it is distant.  Oh, you are looking too low down and see only the foot-hills—­that is it, away up in the sky!” It was there, a peak so lofty that it is solitary.  We were to have seen it better later, but as the hours passed there was a dimness that the light of declining day did not disperse, and the mountain stayed with us in a ghostly way, and held its own in high communion.

As we were leaving Asian waters there came a demand for typhoons that the Captain satisfied completely, saying he was not hunting for them, but the worst one he ever caught was five hundred miles east of Yokohama.  The tourists were rather troubled.  The young man who had been in the wild waltz of the Zealandia did not care for a typhoon.  We had been blessed with weather so balmy and healing, winds so soft and waves so low, that the ship had settled down steady as a river steamboat.  We pushed on, but the best the China could do was fourteen knots and a half an hour, near 350 knots a day, with a consumption of 135 tons of coal in twenty-four hours.  So much