tour in Europe unless you are willing to leave them there.

MARY E. BLAIR.




A JAPANESE MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE.


In describing a Japanese marriage in high life we do not intend to soar
_too_ high. It is not for our alien pen to portray the splendors of such
a marriage as that of the princess of Satsuma to Iyesada, the thirteenth
Shô-gun of the Tokugawa dynasty, when all Yedo was festal and
illuminated for a week. Neither shall we describe that of the imperial
princess Kazu, the younger sister of the Mikado, who came up from Kioto
to wed the young Shô-gun Iyemochi, and thus to unite the sacred blood of
twenty-five centuries of imperial succession with that of the Tokugawas,
the proud family that ruled Japan, and dictated even to her emperors,
for two hundred and fifty years. We leave the description of those royal
nuptials to other pens. Ours aspires only to describe a marriage such as
has happened in old Yedo for the thousandth time in the samurai
class--the gentry of Japan.

Were you with us in Tokio (the new name of the capital of Japan) we
should take you, were you inclined to go, to the place where once stood
the mansion of Yamashiro Kan, a high retainer of the prince of Echizen,
and a lineal descendant of the great Iyeyasu, the founder of the dynasty
of the Shô-guns. Were you to seek for Yamashiro's mansion now, you would
not find it, but instead several very vulgar evidences of the Western