I need not trouble the reader with many details of geography.  My trip lasted eight days, during which I passed over two hundred miles, two-thirds of the way on foot.  I made the entire circuit of the lower half of the peninsula, but shall dwell only on my visit to Kanozan (Deer Mountain), famous for its lovely scenery, temple and Booddhist monastery.  From the top of the mountain there are visible innumerable valleys, nearly the whole of the Gulf of Yeddo, and the white-throned Foosiyama, called the highest mountain in Japan and the most beautiful in the world.  We spent the night previous in Kisaradzu, the capital of the now united provinces, and a neat little city, just beginning to introduce foreign civilization.  Its streets were lighted with Yankee lamps and Pennsylvania petroleum.  Postal boxes after the Yankee custom were erected and in use.  Gingham umbrellas were replacing those made of oiled paper.  Barbers’ poles, painted white with the spiral red band, were set up, and within the shops Young Japan had his queue cut off and his hair dressed in foreign style.  Ignorant of the significance of the symbolic relic of the old days, when the barber was doctor and dentist also, and made his pole represent a bandage wound around a broken limb, the Japanese barber has, in many cases, added a green or blue band.  Not being an adept in the use of that refractory language which Young Japan would so like to flatten out and plane down for vernacular use, the Japanese barber is not always happy in executing the English legend for his sign-board.  The following are specimens: 

“A HAIR-DRESSING SALOON FOR
JAPANES AND FOREIGNER.”

“SHOP OF HAIR.”

“HAIRS CUT IN THE ENGLISH
AND FRENCH FASHION.”

Passing out of Kisaradzu, and winding up to Kanozan over the narrow bridle-path, we pass the usual terraced rice-fields watered by descending rivulets, and the usual thatched and mud-walled cottages, which characterize every landscape in Japan, besides long rows of tall tsubaki (camellia) trees, forty feet high and laden with their crimson and white splendors.  Along the road are the little wayside shrines and sacred portals of red wood which tell where the worshipers of the Shintoo faith adore their gods and offer their prayers without image, idol or picture.  The far more numerous images and shrines of Booddha the sage, Amida the queen of heaven, and hundred-armed Kuannon, tell of the popular faith of the masses of Japan in the gentle doctrines of the Indian sage.  The student of comparative religions is interested in noticing how a code of morals founded upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly destitute of theology, has developed into a colossal system of demonology, dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a pantheon more populous than that of old Rome.  Many of the images by the wayside are headless, cloven by frost, overturned by earthquakes, and so pitted by time as to resemble petrified smallpox patients rather