traveler about like a bale of undesirable merchandise with the duties
still due. But now, what a change! The innkeeper not only received
us, but led the way at once to the best room,--a room in the second
story of the fireproof storehouse at the back, which he hoped would
be comfortable. Comfortable! The room actually proffered us a table
and chairs. No one who has not, after a long day's tramp, sought in
vain to rest his weary body propped up against a side beam in a
Japanese inn can enter into the feeling a chair inspires, even long
afterward, by recollection.

I cannot say I loved Takasaki in former days. Was it my reception or
was it sentiment that made me see it all now through a mist of glamour?
Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything. Few
things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years. Indeed,
sentiment is a kind of religion; or is it religion that is a kind of
sentiment? Both are so subtly busy canonizing the past, and crowning
with aureoles very every-day things as well as very ordinary people.
Not men alone take on a sanctity when they are no more.



III.

The Usui Pass.

The first object to catch my eye, when the shoji were pushed apart,
the next morning, was a string of the ubiquitous paper fish, dangling
limp in the motionless May air from a pole in a neighboring yard;
highly suggestive of having just been caught for breakfast. The
sight would have been painfully prophetic but for the food we had