On The Right A Blue Sea With Fortified Islands Upon It,
Wooded Gardens With Massive Retaining Walls, Hundreds Of Fishing-
Boats lying in creeks or drawn up on the beach; on the left a broad
road on which kurumas are
Hurrying both ways, rows of low, grey
houses, mostly tea-houses and shops; and as I was asking "Where is
Yedo?" the train came to rest in the terminus, the Shinbashi
railroad station, and disgorged its 200 Japanese passengers with a
combined clatter of 400 clogs - a new sound to me. These clogs add
three inches to their height, but even with them few of the men
attained 5 feet 7 inches, and few of the women 5 feet 2 inches; but
they look far broader in the national costume, which also conceals
the defects of their figures. So lean, so yellow, so ugly, yet so
pleasant-looking, so wanting in colour and effectiveness; the women
so very small and tottering in their walk; the children so formal-
looking and such dignified burlesques on the adults, I feel as if I
had seen them all before, so like are they to their pictures on
trays, fans, and tea-pots. The hair of the women is all drawn away
from their faces, and is worn in chignons, and the men, when they
don't shave the front of their heads and gather their back hair
into a quaint queue drawn forward over the shaven patch, wear their
coarse hair about three inches long in a refractory undivided mop.
Davies, an orderly from the Legation, met me, - one of the escort
cut down and severely wounded when Sir H. Parkes was attacked in
the street of Kiyoto in March 1868 on his way to his first audience
of the Mikado. Hundreds of kurumas, and covered carts with four
wheels drawn by one miserable horse, which are the omnibuses of
certain districts of Tokiyo, were waiting outside the station, and
an English brougham for me, with a running betto. The Legation
stands in Kojimachi on very elevated ground above the inner moat of
the historic "Castle of Yedo," but I cannot tell you anything of
what I saw on my way thither, except that there were miles of dark,
silent, barrack-like buildings, with highly ornamental gateways,
and long rows of projecting windows with screens made of reeds - the
feudal mansions of Yedo - and miles of moats with lofty grass
embankments or walls of massive masonry 50 feet high, with kiosk-
like towers at the corners, and curious, roofed gateways, and many
bridges, and acres of lotus leaves. Turning along the inner moat,
up a steep slope, there are, on the right, its deep green waters,
the great grass embankment surmounted by a dismal wall overhung by
the branches of coniferous trees which surrounded the palace of the
Shogun, and on the left sundry yashikis, as the mansions of the
daimiyo were called, now in this quarter mostly turned into
hospitals, barracks, and Government offices.
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