dozing off into blissful dreams of home and
soft green midland lanes; mosquitoes siug their
war-chant over your prostrate body; and the
thousaud-and-one noxious reptiles which love
the rainy days of hot climates—those huge
washing days of the tropics—come round you
as familiar guests, and make you regret the
biting east winds and brown fogs of your own
native land. Add to which enjoyments bad
water and little of it, if you are at Nagasaki
(the best and plentiful at Hakodate), no milk,
a scarcity of outcher's meat, not the ghost
of a pat of butter, and a government spy at
your elbow wherever you turn, and you have
some of the more prominent drawbacks to our
latest Eden—a few shaded spots, just to show
off the brighter colours with more intensity.

All Japan is not so bad as this; but, unluckily,
the places assigned to the foreigner—-
generally parts of temples—- are low, damp, and
unhealthy, and so situated that every disadvantage
of climate and country is more keenly felt.
Has this been a bit of Japanese policy—the
policy which finds itself forced to yield to the
moral force and superior knowledge of its six
hundred foreign guests, but which yields
unwillingly, and puts as many unboiled peas as may
be into their shoes? If these are the dark spots,
the bright are an enormous amount of unwrought
mineral wealth, the richest natural beauty—such
flowers! such birds and butterflies!—a delicious
climate in the spring and autumn, a people
friendly if rightly taken, and capabilities of
commercial improvement beyond the most speculative
hopes of the most sanguine adventurers.

Unfortunately, our traders tried to grasp
too much at once. Fancy through what a
commercial crisis those stately, quiet subjects
of the Mikado must have passed, when,
instead of the two Dutch galliots and the couple
of Chinese junks which, for the last two
centuries, were the sole foreign ships allowed to
enter once a year into their ports, fourteen
square-rigged vessels were in the Nagasaki
harbour at once—fifteen thousand tons of shipping
crying out with hoarse voices, "Trade, buy,
pay." Such a monstrous demand as this could
not create an adequate supply in a moment.
Manufactures and commercial productions do
not spring up like Jonah's gourd, in a night;
and the fifteen thousand tons must knock about
the Japanese seas yet a little while, before the
wax and rice and tea and silk and wheat and oil,
which they required could be put on board, and
the hungry supercargoes sent away rejoicing.

Again, how could the Japanese treasury find
in four months change in "itzabous" for millions
of pounds sterling? This was about the
amount asked for by the invading merchants,
with immense displeasure and bullying when
refused. No wonder that, with such fabulous
desires from without, provisions and
manufactures rising to famine price all over the
country within, the sudden discovery that they
had been parting with their sacred gold at one-
third its real value, and selling their goods at a
hundred per cent profit to the stranger, while
at such infinite inconvenience to their own
people, the Japanese officials were annoyed and
terrified, and took to subtleties and delays—to
the issuing of worthless paper " taels," which
the stranger would not take, and then to the
"foreigners' nichou," which the natives would
not take. This last seemed to be an admirable
stroke of policy, raising up an impenetrable but
legal and unaggressive barrier between
themselves and their voracious visitors. And so it
would have been if the consuls had been men of
delicate nerves, or weak wills; but they made
such a furious fuss about the paper which was
not good on 'Change, and the silver, which
would not pass in Japan, that these two acute
schemes were abandoned, and the puzzled officials
at Yedo left to devise other plans to keep
back the tide, or give themselves harikari if they
failed. The Japanese really wished to keep the
treaties, only the trading nations were too sudden,
too impatient, and too excessive, and wanted
to fill their barns before the grain had been sown
or the ground even prepared. Then ensued
quarrels and misunderstandings; and, to the
impetuous Western temper, the endless delays
consequent on sending to Yedo for permission
to say or do what seemed as plain and inevitable
as the sunshine, were inexpressibly trying; then
the want of command over the language, and the
lengthy forms and ceremonies, costing such
hours of priceless time, and the subtle intellect
always planning ways of legal but disappointing
escape, and the ruined fortunes of men too hasty
and too confident, all made the first days of the
famous treaty days of turmoil and confusion. The
strangers reviled the natives, and the natives
reviled the strangers, and the beautiful gardens of
the new Eden were found tenanted with the
inevitable serpent—a serpent with its scales of
gold and silver itzabous, its crest of paper taels,
and its backbone an indefinitely prolonged and
unwelcome commercial treaty. The trading
strangers, too, not content with demanding an
amount of money which no treasury in the
world, and scarce half a dozen of the richest
united, could supply, added a dash of the gent's
peculiar humour to the transaction. Men owning,
perhaps, a thousand dollars, if so much, put
down their names for millions of itzabous—such
names as Snooks, Jack Ketch, Walker,
Nonsense, Brown Jones and Robinson, &c.; so
that we can scarcely be surprised if, with
greediness set off by insolence and vulgarity, the
perplexed and outraged Japanese tried to turn
their backs on their invaders, and wished to tear
their treaty to ribbons. Unfortunately for them
their invaders are the strongest, and the hand of
fate and sorrow lies heavily on them. The very
gods themselves pronounced against the treaty
and the admission of the foreigner, and sent down
messages of wrath in the cholera at Yedo, and
the death of their king. These disasters sealed
and consecrated the treaties. The Japanese
understood those messages, they say; and know
now that their ancient gods have forgotten to
be gracious, and that their innovations are
displeasing to Heaven. But, the treaties are