away again. It is not told that Xenophon regretted his adventure.
Certainly I am not sorry I was wedded to my idea.

To most of my acquaintance Noto was scarcely so much as a name, and
its local habitation was purely cartographic. I found but one man
who had been there, and he had dropped down upon it, by way of harbor,
from a boat. Some sympathetic souls, however, went so far toward it
as to ask where it was.

To the westward of Tokyo, so far west that the setting sun no longer
seems to lose itself among the mountains, but plunges for good and
all straight into the shining Nirvana of the sea, a strangely shaped
promontory makes out from the land. It is the province of Noto,
standing alone in peninsular isolation.

It was partly in this position that the fascination lay. Withdrawn
from its fellows, with its back to the land, it faced the glory of
the western sky, as if in virginal vision gazing out upon the deep.
Doubly withdrawn is it, for that the coast from which it stands apart
is itself almost unvisited by Europeans,--an out-of-the-world state,
in marked contrast to the shore bordering the Pacific, which is now a
curbstone on the great waterway round the earth, and incidentally
makes a happy parenthesis of promenade for the hasty globe-trotter.
The form, too, of the peninsula came in for a share in its attraction.
Its coast line was so coquettishly irregular. If it turned its back
on the land, it stretched its hands out to the sea, only to withdraw
them again the next moment,--a double invitation. Indeed, there is
no happier linking of land to water. The navigator in such parts
becomes himself a delightfully amphibious creature, at home in both
elements. Should he tire of the one, he can always take to the other.