May 21.

Eighteen days of unintermitted rolling over "desolate rainy seas"
brought the "City of Tokio" early yesterday morning to Cape King,
and by noon we were steaming up the Gulf of Yedo, quite near the
shore. The day was soft and grey with a little faint blue sky,
and, though the coast of Japan is much more prepossessing than most
coasts, there were no startling surprises either of colour or form.
Broken wooded ridges, deeply cleft, rise from the water's edge,
gray, deep-roofed villages cluster about the mouths of the ravines,
and terraces of rice cultivation, bright with the greenness of
English lawns, run up to a great height among dark masses of upland
forest. The populousness of the coast is very impressive, and the
gulf everywhere was equally peopled with fishing-boats, of which we
passed not only hundreds, but thousands, in five hours. The coast
and sea were pale, and the boats were pale too, their hulls being
unpainted wood, and their sails pure white duck. Now and then a
high-sterned junk drifted by like a phantom galley, then we
slackened speed to avoid exterminating a fleet of triangular-
looking fishing-boats with white square sails, and so on through
the grayness and dumbness hour after hour.

For long I looked in vain for Fujisan, and failed to see it, though
I heard ecstasies all over the deck, till, accidentally looking
heavenwards instead of earthwards, I saw far above any possibility
of height, as one would have thought, a huge, truncated cone of
pure snow, 13,080 feet above the sea, from which it sweeps upwards
in a glorious curve, very wan, against a very pale blue sky, with
its base and the intervening country veiled in a pale grey mist.
{1} It was a wonderful vision, and shortly, as a vision, vanished.