heavy rain came on, and the gale fell temporarily with it. The
boat is not fit for a night passage, and always lies in port when
bad weather is expected; and as this was said to be the severest
gale which has swept the Tsugaru Strait since January, the captain
was uneasy about her, but being so, showed as much calmness as if
he had been a Briton!

The gale rose again after sunrise, and when, after doing sixty
miles in fourteen hours, we reached the heads of Hakodate Harbour,
it was blowing and pouring like a bad day in Argyllshire, the spin-
drift was driving over the bay, the Yezo mountains loomed darkly
and loftily through rain and mist, and wind and thunder, and
"noises of the northern sea," gave me a wild welcome to these
northern shores. A rocky head like Gibraltar, a cold-blooded-
looking grey town, straggling up a steep hillside, a few coniferae,
a great many grey junks, a few steamers and vessels of foreign rig
at anchor, a number of sampans riding the rough water easily, seen
in flashes between gusts of rain and spin-drift, were all I saw,
but somehow it all pleased me from its breezy, northern look.

The steamer was not expected in the gale, so no one met me, and I
went ashore with fifty Japanese clustered on the top of a decked
sampan in such a storm of wind and rain that it took us 1.5 hours
to go half a mile; then I waited shelterless on the windy beach
till the Customs' Officers were roused from their late slumbers,
and then battled with the storm for a mile up a steep hill. I was
expected at the hospitable Consulate, but did not know it, and came
here to the Church Mission House, to which Mr. and Mrs. Dening
kindly invited me when I met them in Tokiyo. I was unfit to enter
a civilised dwelling; my clothes, besides being soaked, were coated