was very great.  It must be a charming place when the temperature is low enough to admit of walks into the country.  As it is we have just passed into the sea, through what Captain Osborn calls a succession of Mount Edgecumbes.  I went ashore yesterday and this morning, chiefly to make purchases.  Things here are really beautiful and cheap.  The town is wonderfully clean after China.  Not a beggar to be seen.  The people clean too; for one of the commonest sights is to see a lady in the front of her house, or in the front-room, wide open to the street, sitting in a tub washing herself.  I never saw a place where the cleanliness of the fair sex was established on such unimpeachable ocular evidence.

[Sidenote:  Gales.]

August 6th.—­Four P.M.—­At anchor off the southernmost point of Japan.  It has been blowing hard all day, and our captain proposed, that instead of rounding this point and facing the sea and wind, against which we should not be able to make any way, we should creep in under it and anchor.  We intend to remain till the gale abates.  Nothing can be finer than the coast.  We have passed to-day some very high hills, one especially on an island to the right, and a conical- shaped one on the left, on the Japan mainland.  I see little sign of population on this coast off which we are anchored:  only one little fishing village.  There were a good many junks yesterday.  It is very hot though, and I find it difficult to sit at my table and write.

    August 7th.—­Three P.M.—­Still at anchor in the same spot.  The storm
    has not abated, and the wind is dead against us.  My time is so short
    that I cannot well afford to lose any.

August 10th.—­Ten A.M.—­I wonder if I shall be able to write a few lines legibly.  There is still a good deal of motion, but a cool breeze, which is such a relief after the sweltering six weeks we have spent.  Ahead of us is a great conical-shaped mountain, the sacred mountain of Fusiama (etymologically ’the matchless mountain’), and somewhere nearer on the long range of bold coast which we are approaching, we expect to find Simoda.  But I must tell you of our two past days—­days of suffering.  At about twelve during the night of the 7th, the wind shifted and began to blow into our anchorage, so as to make it unsafe to stay there, and to promise us a fair wind if we proceeded on our way; so off we started.  We have had our fair wind, but a great deal of it; and as the ‘Furious’ is both a bad sailer and a good roller, we have passed a very wretched time,—­every hole through which air could come closed.  However, we have made good progress and burnt little coal, which is good for the public interest.  We see now in the distance two sails, which we suppose may be our consorts, the ‘Emperor’ and ‘Retribution.’  We have travelled some 1000 miles since we left Shanghae, besides spending two days at Nagasaki.

[Sidenote:  Coast view.]