CHAPTER XIX

THE SHŌGUN OR TYCOON

In the beginning of 1867 there was a great stir in Japanese politics, and it was evident to those who, like ourselves, were more or less behind the scenes that we were on the eve of what might prove to be a critical state of affairs whichever party gained the upper hand. Meanwhile the Shōgun Iyémochi had died on the 19th of September, 1866, and Tokugawa Kéiki, who, as I have already said, was the third son of the Lord of Mito and whose rise was due to the intrigues of his father, succeeded to the office; he soon announced his intention of receiving the foreign ministers at Ōsaka, an ugly city of rivers and canals, a great and important trade centre, but with no claim other than its waterways to be called, as it sometimes was, the Venice of the Far East. In the first week of February Mr. Satow and myself were sent in a man-of-war to make the necessary arrangements and settle all the questions of etiquette and procedure which might crop up. We had with us as guests Captain Cardew of the 9th Regiment and Lieutenant Thalbitzer of the Danish Navy.

We landed at Hiōgo and rode to Ōsaka. Besides a mounted escort of officers soldiers were posted at intervals all along the road, and as we passed each post the men fell in and followed behind us, so that by the time we reached our destination we had a tail of between two and three thousand men. This was pretty good evidence of the anxiety of the Government for our safety.

On landing we heard that the Mikado Komei had died of smallpox on the 3rd of February—as a matter of fact he had died on the 30th of January, but for some mysterious reason the date was given as four days later. His successor, the famous Emperor Mutsu Hito, was then a boy of fifteen. Those who knew him had great faith in his ability and predicted great things for him if he should be properly trained. Their forecast was well justified. Had the Emperor Komei, who was a deadly foe to all foreign intercourse, lived the events of the next few months must have been very different.

When we reached Ōsaka we found that a pretty little shrine in a street more or less devoted to temples had been prepared for our reception. We were feasted and treated right royally, and everything was done to make our duties easy and our stay agreeable. It will astonish the tourist of to-day to hear that we were looked upon as such curiosities that the street in which we lived was so crowded with sightseers as to be almost impassable and the hucksters and costers of Ōsaka set up a fair outside our temple, where they did a roaring trade in fruit, sweetmeats, cheap toys and the like.

Although our mission to Ōsaka was nominally intended to arrange the ceremonial to be observed at the approaching reception by the Tycoon of the Foreign Representatives, and especially of Sir Harry Parkes, it gave an excellent opportunity for obtaining information as to the political situation in Kiōto. It was during this visit that I first made acquaintance with some of the leading men of the clans—men who were destined to play a great part in the days that were to follow. We were visited by representatives of both the rival parties, that of the discontented Daimios and that of the Tycoon. Foremost among the latter were some of the northerners of Aidzu, men who were ready to lay down their lives, and did actually die, for the honour of the Tokugawa; others from the Satsuma, Chōshiu, Tosa and Uwajima clans were moving heaven and earth for the deposition of the Shōgun.

We learned much about the intrigues that were going on at Kiōto, plots and counterplots of which the interest has long since faded away owing to the very greatness of the results which have issued from them. The men themselves who kept us so well informed have almost all, one by one, been gathered to their fathers. Komatsu of the Satsuma clan, whom we saw almost daily during our stay in Ōsaka, Prince Ito of the Chōshiu clan, Kido of the same clan, the most brilliant of all—Gotō of Tosa whose statue stands in Tokio, Nakai, and others all gone! The last of our special friends, Marquis Inouyé, one of the elder statesmen, died a month since. I doubt whether there can be six men alive who played a leading part in those stirring events. And during the last twelve months the great Mikado, whose reign will always be so famous, and the Shōgun whom he magnanimously forgave, have themselves gone to the realm of shadows, living only in history.

We had to be very careful in arranging our interviews, for naturally we were pretty closely watched by the blessed spies who were attached to us “for our protection.” Still we did manage once or twice to escape from the Argus-eyed and to have at least two interviews from which even the less important men of the Daimio party were shut out.

One message which I was desired to give to Sir Harry Parkes was, read by the light of subsequent events, supremely interesting. It was to the effect that the object of the Prince of Satsuma and of the coalition of Daimios was not to upset the government of the Shōgun, but to prevent it from making a bad use of its powers. That Satsuma hoped to see the Mikado restored to the ancient honours of his race, because that would contribute to the weal of the country; that their plans and hopes all tended not to revolution against the Shōgun but to the benefit of the country at large—that if Sir Harry, on reaching Ōsaka, would moot the question of a new treaty with the Mikado direct, the Daimios would at once give their adherence to the proposal and flock to Kiōto to carry out this great work. Let Sir Harry help them to this very small degree and they would answer for the rest.

Truly a modest programme; but _l’appétit vient en mangeant_; a few short months later it would have excited ridicule.

We did a great deal of shopping during our stay in Ōsaka, for, of course, we wished to carry away some of the _mei-butsu_, special wares, for which the great city was famous. Lacquer, quaint pipes of many patterns, fans, and brocade were temptations not to be resisted. Wherever we went we were pursued by huge crowds through which a way was cleared for us by petty officials, armed only with the _Wakizashi_ or dirk, who kept shouting a sort of crow-like cry of _Kan! Kan!_ But the mob, friendly but very persistent, was not to be shouted away. The attraction was too great.

When, after having fulfilled our mission at Ōsaka, we reached Yedo we found that a tragedy had taken place in the Legation during our absence. There were a good many men who were unable to get over the constant dread of murder at the hands of the armed swashbucklers who used to ruffle along the streets of Yedo, scowling at the hated foreigners and sometimes making as though they would draw their keen heavy swords, to deliver that first deadly blow which would cut a man almost from shoulder to waist—a blow so well known that we were advised if we saw an inch of steel bared to shoot the ruffian at sight. One of our young student interpreters was so possessed by the terror which haunted him by day and by night that he never went outside the gates of the Legation and even petitioned the Chief to send home for a couple of Armstrong guns for our better protection, though we already had a company of the 9th and our mounted escort.

One night the poor fellow could stand it no longer. He dined quietly with the others and then went off to his room. Two shots were heard. His hand must have trembled, for he missed himself with the first, the bullet of which was found in the wall; the second shot was fatal. They say that suicide is infectious; within a week there were two more cases in Yokohama. It is hard to realize nowadays the conditions of life in the early times of our intercourse with Japan. For nearly four years I never wrote a note without having a revolver on the table, and never went to bed without a Spencer rifle and bayonet at my hand. Think of that, you who walk through the streets of Yedo and Kiōto, swinging a dandy cane with as great safety as you would in Regent Street or Piccadilly, and thank your stars that the carrying of sword and dirk has been abolished by law.

In the month of May, 1867, Sir Harry Parkes and the rest of us went to Ōsaka for the first reception by the Shōgun.

The Castle of Ōsaka was, and still is, so far as its outer fortress is concerned, a most stupendous monument of feudalism, the crowning glory of Hidéyoshi, commonly spoken of as Taiko Sama, the son of a woodcutter in the province of Owari, who, towards the end of the sixteenth century, became the supreme _de facto_ ruler of Japan and the conquerer of Corea. Its walls, “seven fathoms thick,” as old Kämpfer puts it, were built of great blocks of granite piled irregularly one above the other without mortar in cyclopean pattern or rather no pattern, massive, wonder-raising. Walls moated by two rivers, the Yodo and the Kashiwari. Some of the stones are more than thirty feet long and nearly twenty feet high, sent, as it is said, by way of tribute by the lords of many provinces. It is a noble structure, moated, very plain and simple, featureless with the exception of the curved roofs of the great towers, its very simplicity adding to its grandeur; against a host armed with bows and spears, with perhaps a few matchlocks, an impregnable fortress. Here Hidéyori, the son of Hidéyoshi, was born, and here he lived with his mother, a woman of great character, in full security, and for a while in friendship with Iyéyasu. The end of that friendship and the fall of the castle of Ōsaka rank among the romances of history.

Over and over again the great stronghold was attacked by the Tokugawa; twice it was nearly lost by treachery—but the garrison always beat off their assailants, until at last a fire broke out within the castle and there was a panic. Hidéyori and his gloriously brave mother were never seen again: they must have perished in the flames; and Iyéyasu triumphed only to die some months afterwards from the effects of a wound received during the siege. After his death he was deified, or perhaps I should rather say canonized, as an incarnation of Buddha under the title of Gongen Sama.

It was in this great historic castle that our reception by the Shōgun took place. Never can anything of the kind be seen again. The Shōgunate has disappeared and is now only spoken of in Japan as something prehistoric; the last of the Shōguns died a few months ago; the castle itself no longer exists as it then was. The outer shell still stands but the magnificent palace which it contained was gutted and burnt by the Shōgun’s own people when, after the battle of Fushimi they came back in bitter despair, aching with the pain of defeat, and many of them stung to the quick by the flight of their lord.

How cruelly this sorrow ate into the hearts of the faithful retainers and adherents of the great House of Tokugawa may be felt from the following true story. I am anticipating by a year, but I am not writing a consecutive history; only jotting down stray notes of a sort of “voyage en zigzag” across my memory. When the defeated Shōgun reached Yedo and was safely lodged (for a short while!) in his ancestral castle, a member of his second Council, one Hori Kura no Kami, went to him and urged him to perform _hara-kiri_ as the only way to wipe out the stain which had smirched the august Family. To prove his sincerity he declared himself ready to do the same. The Shōgun is reported to have laughed at him, saying that such barbarous customs were out of date. Upon this Hori Kura no Kami prostrated himself, making due obeisances and retiring to an adjoining chamber, stripped to the waist, drew his dirk, and plunging it into himself died the death of a noble samurai.

Tokugawa Kéiki was wrong when he said that _hara-kiri_ was out of date as a barbarous custom. It is to this day the end of constancy and honour; witness the death of the great Satsuma General Saigo, whom I knew well, in the rebellion of 1877; witness the self-immolation of my gallant old friend, General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, two years ago (in 1913); broken by grief at the death of the Mikado Mutsu Hito he would not outlive the master whom he loved, and so he died, and that faithful lady his wife died with him.

During our stay at Ōsaka we had three interviews with the Shōgun; of these the first was naturally the most interesting, although it was only semi-official, for not only had it the taste of novelty, but it also afforded the opportunity for a more intimate interchange of ideas than would be possible on a state occasion. Accompanied by a number of dignitaries of the Shōgun’s government and escorted not only by our own men, seventeen splendid Lancers picked from the Metropolitan Police, and a company of the 9th Regiment, but also by a small army of Japanese soldiers, we rode to the castle in solemn procession. We were privileged to remain on horseback beyond the place where all Japanese, high and low, were required to dismount, and only left our horses at an inner gate, immediately opposite the enormous hall of the palace, which was, indeed, an inner castle surrounded, as was the outer one, by a moat. Here we were received by a number of officials of high rank, who led us to a waiting-room where tea and various dainties were served. I take the account of our reception from a letter which I wrote at the time, on May the 6th, 1867.

The interior of the palace was far more magnificent than anything that I had seen in Japan. The walls were covered with gold leaf, decorated with those glorious paintings of trees, flowers, birds and beasts, for which the Kano school of artists is famous. The hangings were the finest rush mats, suspended by gilt hooks from which hung huge silken tassels in tricolour—orange, red and black—the colours of the Zingari ribbon. The upper panels formed a frieze, deeply carved by some native Grinling Gibbons in the highest style of Japanese art, lavishly gilt and painted; every panel was different, no two alike. Peacocks and cranes strutting in all the pride of beauty, delicate groups of tender-coloured azaleas, bamboos bending their graceful feathers to the wind, pine trees with foliage almost black with age, were the subjects chosen. The uprights and cross-beams were of plain unpolished keaki wood, fastened with metal bolts, capped with niello work. The ceiling was coffered in squares, carved, gilt and painted, and the divisions were richly lacquered in black and gold. Sumptuous as it all was there was nothing tawdry or glaring in this fever of splendour, for it was all two hundred years old, softened and subdued by the patina of time.

If old Kämpfer’s account, or rather, the story told by his informant, was correct, there once stood inside the palace precincts a tower “several stories high, whose innermost roof is covered and adorned with two monstrous large fish, which, instead of scales, are covered with golden obang, finely polished, which, on a clear, sunshiny day reflect the rays so strongly that they may be seen as far as Hiōgo. This tower was burned down about thirty years ago, to compute from 1691.” These monstrous fishes were examples of the mystic Shachihoko, which are seen on so many roofs, and the obang was the great oval gold coin, some five or six inches long, flat like a scale, which must have made a rare jacket for a fish.

We were kept some little time in the first room talking with the various dignitaries, as is natural in every land, about the weather, and then we were led into the reception hall, where, in deference to European habits, a table was set out with eight seats, and at one end a richly lacquered chair for the Shōgun. Here we were met by the Gorôjiu (the Council of State, literally “Elders”), and the members of the Second Council, and were told that the great Prince would immediately make his appearance.

A few seconds afterwards two of the tall sliding screens which wall a Japanese room were slowly and noiselessly drawn aside, and that long-drawn “hush” caused by the drawing-in of breath which announces the coming of a great personage thrilled all through the whole palace like the most delicate _pianissimo_ of a huge orchestra; for a second or two the Tycoon, motionless as a statue, stood framed in the opening between the screens, an august and imposing figure. All the Japanese prostrated themselves, with the exception of the Gorôjiu and the members of the Second Council, who, presumably, only were excused this reverence in order that there might be no difference between them and us. The great man stepped into the room, bowed, shook hands with Sir Harry Parkes “in barbarum,” as Tacitus puts it, and we all sat down—four Japanese on one side of the table, Sir Harry, Mr. Locock, Mr. Satow and myself on the other. Then the Shōgun rose very gracefully and asked after the health of Queen Victoria. This was responded to by Sir Harry standing and inquiring after the Mikado. He then led the conversation into business questions.

The great man, in the course of this unofficial and more or less confidential talk, showed that he was well posted as to all that had taken place during the early days after the signing of the Elgin Treaty and up to the then present time. He spoke frankly and without reserve of the troublous years that we had gone through. He deplored the difficulties which had stood in the way of any satisfactory intercourse between his countrymen and ours, and announced his determination to inaugurate a better order of things. His manner was quite charming. He was at first, not unnaturally, a little shy and nervous, for he had some awkward admissions to make, but his great natural distinction and kindly courtesy soon shook off all restraint, and he talked freely and easily.

Certainly Prince Tokugawa Kéiki, the last of the Shōguns, was a very striking personality. He was of average Japanese height, small as compared with Europeans, but the old Japanese robes made the difference less apparent. I think he was the handsomest man, according to our ideas, that I saw during all the years that I was in Japan. His features were regular, his eye brilliantly lighted and keen, his complexion a clear, healthy olive colour. The mouth was very firm, but his expression when he smiled was gentle and singularly winning. His frame was well-knit and strong, the figure of a man of great activity; an indefatigable horseman, as inured to weather as an English master of hounds. When I saw him again forty years later age had altered him but little. He had retained all his charm of manner, and though the face was lined his features had undergone hardly any change, and the distinction of race was as evident as ever. He was a great noble if ever there was one. The pity of it was that he was an anachronism.

After about an hour spent in very friendly conversation the Shōgun asked to see our escort, who were waiting in an inner court of the palace. They showed him lance and sword exercise, with which he seemed highly delighted, but what interested him the most was the size of our horses, Gulf Arabs, rather a good-looking lot which we had imported from India, and he, as a horse-lover, commented a good deal upon their superiority to the Japanese native ponies, which certainly are about as mean a breed of the genus horse as exists anywhere.

The Shōgun had invited us to stay for dinner. In these days (1915) a banquet served in the French fashion in the palace of a Japanese grandee is an everyday affair, but at the time of which I am writing for four Englishmen to find themselves hobnobbing with the Tycoon and his Gorôjiu was an unprecedented occurrence, impossible anywhere out of dreamland. The great man presided, and we were waited upon by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the pages of honour. In the middle of dinner the Shōgun rose and proposed the Queen’s health, a compliment till then absolutely unknown in the Land of Sunrise, and therefore all the more indicative of the desire to please. Sir Harry responded with a toast in honour of our host. After dinner we adjourned into an inner room where the Shōgun gave each of us a present of two pieces of crape, and a pipe and tobacco-pouch of silk embroidered by the ladies of the palace.

But the prettiest compliment, so gracefully offered, was yet to come. The room in which we were was hung round with a number of portraits of poets and poetesses which had been presented to one of the Tokugawa Shōguns by some Daimio about two hundred years before. We were looking at these with no little curiosity when the Tycoon insisted on having one of them taken down and presenting it to Sir Harry in memory of his visit. Sir Harry naturally demurred to accepting it, pointing out what a pity it would be to break the set; but the Prince would take no denial, saying that “when he looked on the vacant space it would give him pleasure to think that the picture that had once filled it was in the possession of the British Minister.” Could courtesy find a higher expression?

We remained at the palace till past nine o’clock and it was a satisfaction to hear next day that the occasion of his first introduction to Englishmen had afforded our princely host as much pleasure as it had given us.

The State ceremony was, of course, far more stiff and formal, but it was also infinitely more quaint, for there was no taste of Europe about it. We were living through a chapter, or perhaps I should rather say a paragraph of a chapter, taken out of the old-world romance of the furthest East. The Shōgun and his nobles were clad in the immemorial Court dress; flowing trousers as long as the train of a Buckingham Palace great lady, loose hempen jackets, and the curious little black lacquer caps like boxes (_yéboshi_) on their heads. You may see them portrayed on golden screens and old paintings. In no country that I have seen is Court dress triumphant in beauty, but here it was absolutely grotesque, forcing the wearers into the most ungraceful shuffling movements. I have no doubt that we seemed equally absurd to our hosts, for the cocked hat, now the coveted privilege of every Japanese official, was then a mystery unknown as the future which has given birth to it.

On the following day the Shōgun returned to Kiōto for a meeting of Daimios whom he had summoned to confer upon the affairs of the Empire. Meanwhile our negotiations had gone smoothly; the great man had shown himself to be most friendly, and we were in high hopes that the opening of Ōsaka in the following January would be the harbinger of new and happier relations between Japan and the Western world.

There was a talk of my being removed from Japan at this time. I was very unwilling to leave the country at so interesting a moment. In a letter written home I find the reason of my reluctance. “If I go I shall miss the opening of Ōsaka and Hiōgo to foreign trade which will be the _last event of political importance in Japan_ in our time.” What a blind prophet! I stayed on, but I was fated to see a good many events of greater “political importance” than the opening of the two ports.

END OF VOLUME I

_Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey._

FOOTNOTES

[1] The name Wansbeck is derived from “want,” the old English word for a mole: the beck or stream of the mole. The word, by the by, is still alive in Gloucestershire, where a molehill is an “unt-yeave.”

[2] Midford = between the fords.

[3] Sir Robert Bertram’s name is given as Richard in Burke’s “Landed Gentry,” where it is further said that he was a son of the Lord of Dignam in Normandy.

[4] The Duchess of Cleveland’s “Battle Abbey Roll.”

[5] The Duchess of Cleveland’s “Battle Abbey Roll.”

[6] “Battle Abbey Roll” _ut supra_.

[7] Painted by Jackson.

[8] Painted by Romney.

[9] Painted as a young man by a French artist in the manner of Nattier. Also as an old man by ——?

[10] Painted by Prince Hoare of Bath—foreign corresponding secretary of the Royal Academy.

[11] Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

[12] Portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Heathcote by Owen.

[13] A pastel of her as a little girl with a pet goldfinch in a cage, by Russell—generally regarded as Russell’s best work.

[14] Shipston on Stour, where the guardians meet.

[15] Afterwards Earl of Westmorland, grandfather of the present earl.

[16] The caricaturists used to make famous fun of Louis Philippe’s head, with its hair brushed up in a sort of cone that made the stem of the pear.

[17] Mr. John Hawtrey (cousin of the Head Master) kept a house at the corner of Keate’s Lane reserved for boys of the lower school. There was no fagging in his house—but his boys were liable to outside fagging. He afterwards kept preparatory schools at Slough and later at Westgate-on-Sea. He was the father of Mr. Charles Hawtrey, the famous actor.

[18]

“Sive tu Lucina probas vocari, Seu Genitalis.”—Horace, “Carmen Seculare,” 15.

[19] The lower master; afterwards Provost of King’s College, Cambridge.

[20] “Dictionary of National Biography.”

[21] See Maxwell Lyte’s “History of Eton College,” p. 526, Ed. 1899.

[22] There can be very few people now living who have seen and talked with the famous Dr. Keate, who was nailed in his desk during the great rebellion and flogged eighty boys in one day. My father, on one of his visits to Eton, took me up to see him in the cloisters at Windsor, where he was canon. In appearance he was exactly like the many caricatures that one used to see of him, but the truculent hero of the birch and block, so faithfully painted by Kinglake in “Eothen,” had grown into a gentle, mild, little old man, of whom it was difficult to believe that he had ever flogged a boy or uttered a harsh word. He had abandoned “the fancy dress, partly resembling the costume of Napoleon and partly that of a widow woman” (“Eothen,” p. 276, Ed. 1896), and was now garbed as a commonplace Early Victorian parson.

[23] At a distribution of prizes at one of the public schools at Paris, as boy after boy was brought up, he said, “Continuez, jeune homme! Premier prix de mathématiques, très bien. Continuez, jeune homme.” At last a Haytian boy was brought up to him. “Ah, c’est vous le nègre. Continuez, jeune homme, continuez!”

[24] “Leaving money” has now been done away with. In my day a sixth form boy on taking leave of the Head Master, laid on his desk an envelope containing £15. For other boys the fee was £10. It was an ignoble custom, rightly abolished.

[25] ἄνδρες δικασταί = jurymen.

[26] Those tapestries are now one of the chief ornaments of the British Embassy at Paris.

[27] Lord Ranelagh’s long hair and beard gave him a certain look of Garibaldi. He was one of the best of good fellows, and had been a gallant soldier in Spain, though in the opposite camp to Wylde. He did much to make the volunteer movement popular.

[28] The Prince Consort died on the 14th December.

[29] Bishop Wilberforce’s answer to a friend who asked him why he was nicknamed “Soapy Sam.”

[30] “The Life of Lord Lyons,” by Lord Newton. 2 vols. Edward Arnold, 1913.

[31] Not the 10th Hussars, as Sir Sidney Lee has it. Of the 10th he was titular Colonel-in-Chief.

[32] In his youth he worked hard at the violin, and it is said with success.

[33] “Miscellaneous Writings,” Vol. VII. p. 123.

[34] He appeared on the stage for the last time in _Macbeth_ at Drury Lane in February, 1851. But I heard him read long after that.

[35] A most picturesque and splendid actor. A Frenchman to all intents and purposes, speaking English with a strong French accent. There was a story that he was born in England, but that is doubtful. He died in America in 1879. (See “Dictionary of National Biography.”)

[36] “Annual Register,” 1863.

[37] Lord Salisbury—“Foreign Policy,” p. 198.

[38] Brockhaus—“Conversations Lexicon,” Art. Polen.

[39] Curiously enough, by one of those ineptitudes for which private secretaries are famous, the brother of this very gentleman, the son of a Polish mother, had been shortly before attached to the British Embassy at St. Petersburg.

[40] “Briefe Kaiser Wilhelm’s des Ersten,” Insel Verlag, Leipzig, 1911, p. 106.

[41] The Grand Duke Nicholas Alexandrovitch, the eldest son of the Tsar. He was in wretched health and died in April, 1865, and the Princess became betrothed to his next brother, who after his father’s murder reigned as Alexander the Third.

[42] Winterbottom, the great trombone player, once said to me, “The notes of a G trombone ought to go _rolling_ through Exeter Hall like footballs.”

[43] Written some years ago (1915).

[44] 18th February, old style; 2nd March, new style.

[45]

“Ia bui v’ miesto phonaria Katorii svietiet v’ niepagodu Vieshal bui golovu Tsaria I provosglocil svobodu.”

[46] _Measure for Measure._

[47] The father of the present (1915) Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army in Poland and Galicia.

[48] An excellent and hospitable club, “Anglais” only in name, of which the _corps diplomatique_ were made honorary members.

[49] A Tartar word signifying “Citadel.”

[50] Revelation ii. 8.

[51] The “Gallery of Illustration” was a place of entertainment famous in those days under the direction of Mr. and Mrs. German Reed (Miss Priscilla Horton), with whom were joined Arthur Cecil and Corney Grain. They produced, among other famous pieces, Sullivan and Burnand’s _Cox and Box_.

[52] See the preface to “Le Nabab.”

[53] Po Hsing—“the hundred names” = the οἱ πολλοί.

[54] Pinus Bungeana.

[55] Sir Rutherford retired in 1871. But he lived for many years afterwards in London, devoting himself to all manner of work for the benefit of the poor, but especially in connection with hospitals, for which his early training and technical knowledge specially fitted him. He died, greatly respected, in 1897 at the age of eighty-eight.

[56] “China under the Empress Dowager,” I.O.P. Bland and E. Backhouse.

[57] See Messrs. Bland and Backhouse.

[58] Bland and Backhouse; cf. “C’est pis qu’une faute, c’est une erreur” (Talleyrand on the murder of the Duc d’Enghien).

[59] Bought at my sale by my old friend Sir Augustus Franks, and now in the collection bequeathed by him to the British Museum.

[60] “The Attaché at Peking.” Macmillan, 1900.

[61] Years afterwards, when Descharmes was military attaché in London, he came to dine with us. Joachim was of the party and had brought his violin quite unexpectedly. He asked for an accompanist. I had asked no one for the purpose, little thinking that it would be required. Descharmes sat down and played the accompaniments at sight, to Joachim’s amazement and great satisfaction. Both violinist and pianist are now alas! dead.

[62] See Professor Longford’s admirable “Story of Old Japan,” p. 312.

[63] See Mr. Longford _ut supra_.

[64] See my “Tales of Old Japan.”

[65] This is borrowed from the Chinese classics; it seems that in the days of the Sung dynasty in China a tower called “the Tower of the Dancing Horse” was burnt down, since which time a great fire is called after it.