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 than
divinities. Nature neither respects dogma nor worships the gods made
by men, and the moss and the lichens have muffled up the idols and
eaten the substance of the sacred stone. Here Booddha wears a robe
of choicest green, and there the little saxafrage waves its white
blossoms from the shoulder of Amida, rending asunder her stone body.
Even the little stone columns which contain a guiding hand pointing
out the road to Kanozan are dedicated to Great Shaka (Booddha).
Passing one of the larger temples, we meet a company of pilgrims.
Actual sight and reasoning from experience in other lands agree in
telling me that they are women, and most of them old women. They
return my salute, politely striving to conceal their wonder at the
first _to-jin_ they have ever looked upon.

I would wager that these people, like most of the rustics in Japan,
have always believed the foreigners from Europe and America to be
certainly ruffians, and most probably beasts. Many of them,
without having heard; of Darwin or Monboddo, believe all the "hairy
foreigners" to be descendants of dogs. Their first meeting with a
foreigner sweeps away the cobwebs of prejudice, and they are ashamed