time, returning to Yeddo as a Japanese of the period, I should of
course burn to adopt railways, telegraphs and balloons, codify the
laws, improve upon United States postage, coinage and dress-coats, and
finish off by annexing the English language after I had cut out all
irregularities and made all the crooked spelling straight.

So, resolving to be a heathen for a week at least, I left Yeddo one
afternoon, though it took several hours to do so: the big city is one
of distances more magnificent than those of Washington. I started in
a _jin-riki-sha_, which baby-carriage on adult wheels has already been
described, so as to be tolerably familiar to all American readers.
The "team" of this "man-power carriage" consists of two men, pulling
tandem--one in the shafts, the other running ahead with a rope over
his shoulder, and, until the recent passage of a law commanding
decency, attired only in his cuticle and a loin-cloth two inches wide.
You take three coolies when you wish to be stylish, while four are
not an unknown sensation in Yeddo. With these and fresh relays you can
travel sixty, or even eighty, miles a day; and I have known one man to
run thirty miles on the stretch.

Of all the modes of traveling in Japan, the jin-riki-sha is the most
pleasant. The _kago_ is excruciating. It is a flat basket, swung on
a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men. If your neck does
not break, your feet go hopelessly to sleep. Headaches seem to lodge
somewhere in the bamboos, to afflict every victim entrapped in it. To
ride in a kago is as pleasant as riding in a washtub or a coffin slung
on a pole. In some mountain-passes stout native porters carry you
pickapack. Crossing the shallow rivers, you may sit upon a platform
borne on men's shoulders as they wade. Saddle-horses are not to be
publicly hired, but pack-horses are pleasant means of locomotion.