see wood carvings and quaint baskets of wood and grass offered
everywhere for sale. It is a truly dull, quaint street, and the
people come out to stare at a foreigner as if foreigners had not
become common events since 1870, when Sir H. and Lady Parkes, the
first Europeans who were permitted to visit Nikko, took up their
abode in the Imperial Hombo. It is a doll's street with small low
houses, so finely matted, so exquisitely clean, so finically neat,
so light and delicate, that even when I entered them without my
boots I felt like a "bull in a china shop," as if my mere weight
must smash through and destroy. The street is so painfully clean
that I should no more think of walking over it in muddy boots than
over a drawing-room carpet. It has a silent mountain look, and
most of its shops sell specialties, lacquer work, boxes of
sweetmeats made of black beans and sugar, all sorts of boxes,
trays, cups, and stands, made of plain, polished wood, and more
grotesque articles made from the roots of trees.

It was not part of my plan to stay at the beautiful yadoya which
receives foreigners in Hachiishi, and I sent Ito half a mile
farther with a note in Japanese to the owner of the house where I
now am, while I sat on a rocky eminence at the top of the street,
unmolested by anybody, looking over to the solemn groves upon the
mountains, where the two greatest of the Shoguns "sleep in glory."
Below, the rushing Daiyagawa, swollen by the night's rain,
thundered through a narrow gorge. Beyond, colossal flights of
stone stairs stretch mysteriously away among cryptomeria groves,
above which tower the Nikkosan mountains. Just where the torrent
finds its impetuosity checked by two stone walls, it is spanned by
a bridge, 84 feet long by 18 wide, of dull red lacquer, resting on
two stone piers on either side, connected by two transverse stone