"Madam," said I, "I do. I have been there before. My heart goes out to Hong-Kong. In the name of the great Indian Mofussil I salute you. Henceforward Hong-Kong is one of Us, ranking before Meerut, but after Allahabad, at all public ceremonies and parades."
I think she fancied I had sunstroke; but you at any rate will know what I mean.
We do not laugh any more on the P. and O. S. S. Ancona on the way to Japan. We are deathly sick, because there is a cross-sea beneath us and a wet sail above. The sail is to steady the ship who refuses to be steadied. She is full of Globe-trotters who also refuse to be steadied. A Globe-trotter is extreme cosmopolitan. He will be sick anywhere.
No. XI
OF JAPAN AT TEN HOURS' SIGHT, CONTAINING A COMPLETE ACCOUNT OF THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF ITS PEOPLE, A HISTORY OF ITS CONSTITUTION, PRODUCTS, ART, AND CIVILISATION, AND OMITTING A MEAL IN A TEA-HOUSE WITH O-TOYO.
"Thou canst not wave thy staff in air
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."—Emerson.
This morning, after the sorrows of the rolling night, my cabin porthole showed me two great grey rocks studded and streaked with green and crowned by two stunted blue-black pines. Below the rocks a boat, that might have been carved sandal wood for colour and delicacy, was shaking out an ivory-white frilled sail to the wind of the morning. An indigo-blue boy with an old ivory face hauled on a rope. Rock and tree and boat made a panel from a Japanese screen, and I saw that the land was not a lie. This "good brown earth" of ours has many pleasures to offer her children, but there be few in her gift comparable to the joy of touching a new country, a completely strange race, and manners contrary. Though libraries may have been written aforetime, each new beholder is to himself another Cortez. And I was in Japan—the Japan of cabinets and joinery, gracious folk and fair manners. Japan, whence the camphor and the lacquer and the shark-skin swords come: among what was it the books said?—a nation of artists. To be sure, we should only stop at Nagasaki for twelve hours ere going on to Kobé, but in twelve hours one can pack away a very fair collection of new experiences.
An execrable man met me on the deck, with a pale-blue pamphlet fifty pages thick. "Have you," said he, "seen the Constitution of Japan? The Emperor made it himself only the other day. It is on entirely European lines."
I took the pamphlet and found a complete paper Constitution stamped with the Imperial Chrysanthemum—an excellent little scheme of representation, reforms, payment of members, budget estimates, and legislation. It is a terrible thing to study at close quarters, because it is so pitifully English.