ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA
able on these lower reaches to help themselves by hoisting a sail, but I shall never understand how they get their boats back through those upper rapids. It was getting dark when we passed through the ruins of the old Tokaido bridge, but in the dusk I could distinguish a row of familiar Noah’s-ark-like forms; they were current-mills moored in the river; and then I knew what my day had lacked—the companionship of the man with whom I had passed so many hundreds of them on the Danube. There was nothing on the Danube quite so sporting as these rapids, but I think it would be possible to get through them in a decked canoe, such as those we used on that river. The pace is tremendous; we did the ninety miles from Tokimata to Naka-no-machi in ten hours of actual travelling, though the latter portion of the journey was on comparatively sluggish water.
About a month after this I stopped at Shizuoka, a large town on the Tokaido, where Ieyasu, greatest of the Shoguns, spent the end of his life in learned leisure, and where Keiki, the last of his successors, deposed in 1868, when the Mikado came to his own again, still lives quietly as a private gentleman. How much more dignified and reasonable is his Oriental acceptance of the accomplished fact than the restless scheming of some Western pretenders, who are unable to see that their ancestors, whether kings or emperors, owed their power to national feeling, and persist in a futile struggle against the inevitable! The Japanese obedience to law and authority, which must, however indirectly, be an expression of the will of the people, was never better shown than in the promptness with which the sword-bearing Samurai ceased to carry their weapons. The Samurai’s blade had been for centuries his most sacred possession, a halo of poetry surrounded it, and the right to wear it in public distinguished him from the common herd; and yet when the imperial edict was issued in 1876 he laid it aside without a
AUTUMN-GRASS (SUZUKI)
murmur, and the curio-shops were soon full of swords, which a month before their owners would sooner have died than lose. It was no doubt very inconvenient to walk about always with two swords stuck in your obi, and perhaps he felt like the curate in the “Bab Ballads,” who was forced by his mild rival to curl his hair and smoke—