use of another wearer. Beside his twelve
wives, he has eighty-one, or nine times nine,
female attendants; for it is a great matter to
secure a descendant. He often resigns in
favour of his son, even of an infant in the
cradle; few of the Japanese, patient, tranquil,
and superstitious as they are, being able
to support the monotonous slavery and gilded
degradation of this holy life.

The Ziogoon, the descendant of a confessed
traitor and usurper, is yet by no means the
absolute autocrat he would seem to be. Law
is supreme in Japan: and justice, severe and
sanguinary as she may be, is yet even-
handed. Even the Ziogoon is subject to the
law, as the old gods of Greece were subject to
Fate. For instance: the council which assists
the monarch in his government proposes a
new order. The Ziogoon, by rare chance,
disapproves and refuses to sign. The matter
is then referred to his three nearest relations,
and, if they uphold the order, the Ziogoon is
forced to resign his sovereignty; but if they
uphold the Ziogoon, the framer of the new
bill must kill himself. Indeed, if anything
goes wrong with the educated Japanese, they
kill themselves without delay; for, by so
doing, they save themselves from a disgraceful
punishment, and preserve to their
families the property which else would be confiscate
to the state. The young nobility take
lessons in the art of disembowelling
themselves gracefully. This is also their mode
of duelling. Two men quarrel; one in rage
and despair kills himself in this manner, the
other, for honour and etiquette, must follow
his example. One would not expect many
quarrels or duels in Japan.

Spies, or cross-eyed persons, are
everywhere, and over everything. They always
go in pairs, so as to be spies over each other;
and, as the violation of the law is death—
death to the highest and to the lowest alike
—we can well understand how the Japanese
have been so obstinate in their conservatism,
under a system of espionnage which nothing
can escape, coupled with a rigidity of law and
ferocity of punishment which no one can
bend and few dare to brave.

They are, on the whole, an industrious
and cultivated people. Their horticulture
is advanced, yet odd. They can enlarge
or decrease to any size they like; make
plum-blossoms four times as big as cabbage-
roses, and radishes of fifty or sixty pounds
in weight; while, at the same time, they
dwarf forest and fruit trees to three feet,
and make Lilliputian gardens of what would
ordinarily be gigantic growths. Among their
chief trees are enormous cedars, furnishing
English ships with spars of ninety-six feet long,
of which none can be cut down but by
permission of the magistrates, and for every one
felled, another must be planted. And they
have tobacco; against which, and strangely
enough in the time of our own James the
First, an edict was passed, subjecting to
severe punishments the growers and
consumers of that plant. The Drinking of
Tobacco is, however, common, spite of edicts
and penalties. Of minerals, they have coals
in abundance; one of the future great hopes
from Japan: gold, silver, wonderfully fine tin,
but little used, copper, quicksilver, lead, iron
made into excellent steel, and native sulphur.
They have few of the rarer jewels; plenty of
jasper, cornelian, agate, &c., but not diamonds
or rubies. They make up for their poverty
of gems by a composition called syakfdo,
which is a mixture of all the metals, and is
greatly prized, having much the appearance
of fine enamel. They use this syakfdo for
the hilts of swords, and various other articles,
which else would be made of, or covered with,
jewels. The scabbards of swords are made
of shark's skin, finely wrought. They also
make a mixture of gold and copper, called
sowas, which afterwards is ornamented with
designs traced in a fine blue or black ink,
making, according to description, a very
beautiful substitute for our niello. The art is a
close secret among the workers. They can
make clocks; and have a famous clock, with
a mouse and all sorts of queer things running
over mountains, &c., almost as complicated as
the clock in the grand old Strasbourg Cathedral;
and they can make watches, telescopes,
thermometers, and barometers; by which
last they measure their mountains: they also
make chronometers and carpenters' tools,—
saws and planes like an English workman's;
and they make glass, both coloured and
uncoloured. But they use oil paper, mica, and
shells for glazing windows, and have not yet
found out the lustrous glory which a broad
square of plate glass gives to the landscape.
Neither have they learnt the art of silvering
glass to any extent, but content themselves
with metallic mirrors, as the old Greeks and
Romans did before them. For doors they
have fine soft mats, for pillows wooden stools,
for shoes sandals of plaited straw, and squares
of paper for cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.

They make better porcelain and silk than
the Chinese: the best of the last is woven by
criminals of high rank, and they plait straw
to perfection. Cotton is a practical nullity
among them, but they make it, though it is
very little used, the soft spongy paper of the
paper mulberry answering all the normal
purposes of cotton. They have drainage,
good roads, trottoirs in the streets, canals,
water-mills, and lathes turned by waterpower;
and they make maps and charts,
better or worse,  as the case may be. They
plough with cows and oxen, eating beef but
sparingly,  if at all, and making no use of milk
or butter; and they have a post—a foot post,
runners carrying the letter-bags, which the
relays toss from one to another  without
stopping. The highest nobles of the land are
forced to give way before those letter-bags
and their bearers. They have bridges,
and they maintain a small coasting trade,