you laugh at all this and at worse things. of the bloated luxury and effeminate I picked up an old San Francisco paper to-day, a paper of June 4th, 1875. Here is an item: 'Private Dalzell is going to lecture on the two American institutions, lying and stealing. It is a shame that such a lecture should be possible. George Washington never told a lie. America has produced one George Washington, and exhausted herself in the effort. George Washington's greatgrandfather was an Englishman; it is a touching case of atavism." "You will become heated, and the night air will injure you," interrupted the doctor, with sarcastic solicitude. "You are a stranger within our gates. It is the fault of our stranger within our gates that he is either exuberantly Californian or exuberantly stranger. In the first case he is a bore, in the second case he is partly amusing and partly of fensive. Every country, like every man, is presumptively good for something, is certainly not good for everything or anything. California and Californians, America and Americans (and you mix these terms frightfully) have their very strong points and their very weak. A man of sense will not come here until he has some approximate idea of the special adaptabilities of the country and of himself, and has decided that the two things fit in some degree as hand and glove. And if he makes a mistake and gets the shoe on the wrong foot or the foot into the wrong shoe, he will see that the blame lies with himself and try again, or fold his tent like the Arab and silently steal away. But the average man is better off here than anywhere else in the world." culture of the down-trodden kingdom of this or empire of that—but ‘corn an' punkins plenty, lub;' plenty to eat and drink-of a sort. I admit, sir, it is a strong position, yours; and there are times when the highest souls yield to its influence-to that overpowering 'besoin de s'encanailler' which even the brilliant and aristocratic Rachel felt once in awhile. “A word or two further, Doctor. It has been said that the dividing ocean makes of America a posterity for contemporary European writers. That, I suppose, works both ways. I, then, am a piece of posterity, judging you. Take what I say in good part. If wrong, I believe myself right, and courteously saying so have the right to a courteous hearing. In the first place, I believe that even buffoon literature has interest and power. Aristophanes could set all Athens into laughter, even at the expense of Euripides. But when the sword and fire of the Greek allies menaced the very existence of the city of the violet crown, the scurrility of the jester was hushed. One man arose in the judgment council, spoke with burning lips one verse from the Electra of Euripides, and the Acropolis was pronounced sacred and saved. Perhaps the salvation of the capital by a goose is the only parallel instance in behalf of the other side of the question that can be produced. "James Russell Lowell does fine humorous work, but that is because he is more than a jester and cares so little for the laugh of the greatest number that he parts his hair in the middle.* Oliver "Precisely, Doctor. You have the Wendell Holmes does even better, but negro song: "De pie am made ob punkins, An' de mush am made ob corn, is too fine for the greatest number. His verse and his prose are for the upper ten "It would require some evidence to-day to remove from the minds of an immense majority of the Amer ican people the unfavorable impression created by a man who parts his hair in the middle.”—Captain E. You see, your position exactly. None Field, in OVERLAND for July, 1875, p. 60. thousand. He is a sarcastic, polished aristocrat to his heart of hearts. He knows he is an aristos, and he takes little trouble to disguise the fact. Then there is our Charlie Stoddard, as finetoned as a flute. Harte has the instincts of a literary gentleman, but his training has been against him, somehow; he has all the talent necessary, but it has been blunted and misapplied. His features and nerves are too fine for the western literary horse-laugh. When I was a boy and made grimaces, my nurse used to tell me, 'Stop that, or God will fix your face so.' God has done so with Harte; one of the finest and most delicate of human imaginations has been calloused and beaten into a showman's drum. He has utterly lost the truthnerve. I have a letter from J. W. Gally, of Nevada, on this point—a man with a sense of humor as keen as ever Harte had, but whose distinguishing points are vividness and verisimilitude. Speaking of Bret Harte, he wrote me: 'To tell you the real truth, I do not find the miners and mountain men so godlessly uncouth as he draws them; nor do I find the "gamboliers" so delicately "high-toned;" nor the harlots, armed with alabaster boxes of ointment, hunting holiness among earth's weaklings under the lengthening and bedimmed shadow of the cross of Golgotha the way in which he seems to find them.' "But then everything must be sacrificed for the laugh. In Gethsemane or Calvary, Mr. Clemens could see nothing but what was funny. I do not deny that it was funny, as he put it. But O, what comparison is there between that clown, laughing among the tombs because he was a clown, and the manly herdsman poet, made great by the few and not the rabble, who addresses Palestine: "To me thou art sacred and splendid, And to me thou art matchless and fair, Joaquin Miller is far from perfect, but even his affectations are eloquent and earnest, and no merely court-jester for the million is worthy to loose his shoelatchet. The quality of artistry is not decided by the roar of vulgar throats— artistry being battle with the age it lives in! You But the doctor was sound asleep; the tide was rising to our very feet. I awoke the sleeper. He rubbed his eyes and cried, as he turned toward his shivering horse: "You admit, then, that I am right. No? Well, to repeat Rousseau, 'Ma fonction est de dire la vérité, mais non pas de la faire croire.' The flask a minute!-my fingers are too cold to tighten this cinch. I shall have a good laugh over all this." Ο IN A JAPANESE PRISON. NE of the principal questions at issue pending the revision of the treaties of Christian nations with Japan is the retention or rescission of the extra-territoriality clause, by which foreigners live in Japan outside the jurisdiction of Japanese law and under the legal protection of their own governments. Most of the objections which VOL. 15.-19. our own and other foreign citizens make against being put under Japanese authority are based upon the fact that jurisprudence, as we understand it, does not exist in Japan, or is at least in its rudimentary stages; and especially that Japanese prisons are unfit to incarcerate foreigners, and the penalties are too severe and summary. Without in any way touching upon this question, the following account of my visit to the chief prison of the empire may be of interest to those who argue on either side of the question. Tokio being the judicial as well as the political centre of the empire, I was anxious to visit the jail there, knowing that I should most probably see the best specimen of prison architecture and discipline in the dominions of the mikado. It may be well to state that the population of the city, by the official census of 1872, is 925,000. Armed with the written permission of the chiji, or mayor of the city, and accompanied by a friend, I started off to Packhorse Street. The prison is situated in the very oldest and most densely populated portion of the city. It occupies 3,640 tsubōs, or about 140 acres. The prison wall outside is twelve feet high, made of rows of tiles laid flat, with earth between each layer, and surmounted with chevaux-de-frise of wooden beams armed with sharpened spikes. In front of the wall and running around it is a clear space of ground about twenty feet wide. On the border of this outer space, at the same distance from the wall, is a rampart of earth five feet high, on which is a fence of bamboo palings. The gate through which the prison is entered is like an ordinary yashiki entrance. Immediately within are the porter's lodge and dwellings of officers, turnkeys, executioners, carcassburiers, and prison attendants of all grades. All the buildings of every kind are of wood. The prison is divided into a number of yards having stone walks, and walls surmounted by iron spikes. The gates are of wood. The prison proper consists of a long one-storied building. The office of the wardens and turnkeys, a room about twenty feet wide, is in the centre, and the cells are ranged east and west of this office. Looking at the prison from the outside, in the clean yard, it reminds one of an enormous coop or cage in a menagerie. All the bars, however, are square, well planed, perfectly smooth, and good specimens of carpenter work. The obsequious turnkey, at the nod of our polite officer, produces a bunch of enormous rods of iron which prove to be keys, though they have neither ward nor barrel, and bear not the slightest resemblance to our clavic instrument. Inserting one in the extreme end of a long lock like a bar, the bolt is drawn from the triple staple. The heavy mass of timber composing the small gate is shunted in its grooves, and we step inside of a cool clean passage like a corridor, with an earthen floor, about a hundred feet long, twelve feet wide, and fifteen feet high. In this wing of the prison are four large cells, each about twenty-five feet square and fifteen feet high. They are made like the outside of the prison, of square bars of hard wood, five inches thick, with spaces between them three inches in width. For about five feet from the floor the timber is solid, and strengthened on the outer side by massive transverse bars of hard wood. Inside the floor is covered with coarse mats. In a recess are the bedclothes which the prisoner is allowed to bring with him; in another recess are his eating utensils. The first cell was for women. There was but one at that time, a mournful-looking young girl, incarcerated the day before. She bowed humbly as we looked into her cell. The prisonkeeper said that few women were ever in prison, usually two or three only. In the next were six men, serving out long terms of imprisonment. All bowed as we looked in, and even appeared to enjoy the sight of two foreigners extremely. In another cell were about forty men listening to one of their number— evidently a literary character-who was reading a book and explaining it to them. These were "state's" men, if we may be permitted to use the New York dialect, serving out terms of short length, some of whom, dressed in the prison - suit of red, went out daily to work on the public roads. They were allowed to spend an hour at their intellectual entertainment after six P. M. At dark they were taken to other cells. We passed round to the end of the ward, seeing the north side of the cells, which were exactly like the south side, and then visited the eastern wing. Here was the cell for samurai. It contained about twelve men, one of whom was a portly and noble-looking man of fifty. One instinctively shrunk from vulgarly gazing at such a man. The cells were like the others as to size, strength, and cleanliness. I was astonished to find everything so clean, and it was evident it was not merely for the occasion. Inquiring of the keeper, I was told that the prisoners were fed twice daily, at nine A.M. and four P.M. Their diet was boiled rice, radishes, pickles, beans, and soup. They were not allowed tea, but drank hot water instead. This is good diet for a Japanese prisoner, and hot water is very commonly drank by the lower classes in Japan. It does not seem to act as an emetic upon them. The food was passed into the cells through a small opening, faced with copper. The prisoners are not allowed to leave their cells for exercise, but the elysium of a hot bath at regular intervals, as a sanitary precaution rather than an indulgence, is permitted, which they eagerly avail themselves of. No lights are allowed at night, nor fires in winter. The cells, from their structure, are very well ventilated. No instances are known of jailbreaking in the Tokio prison, as the floors are heavy planks of hard wood, and nothing made of metal can get into the hands of the prisoners; even their food is eaten with chop-sticks. The prisoners are not allowed to shave their scalps, as all Japanese do and like to do. In the sick ward the floor of the space outside the cells was of smooth plank, and the inmates were allowed to be outside their cells in this place until four P. M. daily. There were five doctors attached to the prison, and medicine was dealt out twice a day. In all there were about 200 prisoners in the jail at the time of our visit, the usual number. From the prison proper we walked to the execution - ground. There are in Tokio three of these aceldamas. One is in the southern suburbs at Suzugamori (grove of the tinkling bells), near Shinagawa; another on the Tokaido, in the northern suburbs at Senji, near Asakusa, on the road to Oshiu; but the number of executions at these two places is very small compared with that in the prison-yard itself. The business of waiting upon condemned criminals, handling and burying the carcasses, and attending to all the ghastly and polluting details of the innumerable beheadings, is done exclusively by a class of men formerly called eta or hinin. As we approached the black gate opening into the awful place, eight or ten of these social outcasts, who were standing near in their uniform dress of blue cotton, at the beck of the chief officer sprung forward to unbar the gate. As they did this, we stood within a few feet of them on the ground where the eyes of the intended victims are bandaged with paper before being led to doom. How many thousands have from that spot taken their last look on earthly things, seeing only sky and black prison-walls. No-for only a few feet off was a blossoming tree! The prison-yard was about eighty feet square. In the north end, under a long covered space, were a number of plain black palanquins, in which criminals of the samurai class were carried to court. Very rough kagos (palanquins)- for ordinary criminals, unable by reason of torture or weakness to walk, but able to sit—were ranged un der another shed, together with long bamboo baskets in which criminals senseless from the torture, unable to sit or walk, were carried in a recumbent position. Here, too, lay the horribly suggestive relics of the strangling apparatus formerly in use. At one end of the yard was a roofed structure of posts, entirely open on all sides. This was the place in which seppuku (harakiri) was committed. Formerly samurai condemned to death were allowed this means of expiating their crimes. A few feet in front of this jisaiba (killing one's self), was a raised platform on which the officer of the court, appointed to witness the act, sat. Canvas screens were stretched round the jisaiba, and out of regard for the criminal's rank none of the lower-grade officers or attendants were allowed to be spectators. The dirk, neatly wrapped in white paper and laid on a tray, was presented to the victim, who sat facing the official witness. Behind him stood the executioner, to strike off his head as soon as he thrust the blade of the dirk into his own body. After decapitation the head of the victim was laid on the tray to be inspected by the officer of justice. Formerly, under the Sho-gun's government, cases of seppuku were very frequent at this place. There was none, however, in 1873, there was but one in 1872, and in 1871 there were five. In previous years many more. About fifteen feet from the jisaiba was the chi-tama, or the blood-pit, in which criminals are beheaded. It is a pit originally about a foot deep and six feet long and four wide. At the top, partly above the ground, was a curb of heavy square wooden planks, six inches thick and deep, which inclosed it. It is kept covered by a sloping timber frame like the roof of a house. When this was lifted off by two etas the hideous reality was startling. In the pit were rough mats soaked with the fresh blood of many criminals. The straw was thickly dyed with the still crimson stains, and on it lay the spotted or soaked paper bandages that had fallen when useless from the eyes of the severed heads. Beneath the upper mat, when lifted by the eta, was another and another, all stained and clotted. The sides of the wooden frame were black with the gore of years, deposited in crusts and lumps. The faint odor that ascended was more horrible in the awful cloud of associations which it called up than in the mere stench. The last execution had taken place three days before, and twenty-five heads had tumbled since the beginning of the year. It was then in April. In that small area a thousand had fallen within ten years, and from its first day of use a myriad of men must have bowed to the sword and shed their blood there. It was awful to picture the hosts that had found this the portal of eternity. The criminal who is to be executed is led bound and blindfolded into the yard, to the chi-tama, where he kneels upon the mats and for the first time smells the odor of the pit, which I fancied must add a ten-fold horror to the moment. The attendant etas, placing the victim in position, take hold of one of his feet, in readiness to jerk the body so as to make it fall forward immediately after the fatal blow is struck. The swordsman, who is a samurai legally protected from disgrace, unsheathing his sword, touches the victim with the flat of the blade to intimate that all is ready and that he must crane his neck and stretch out his head. Hot water is then poured on the sword by an eta to add keenness to its edge. This done, the death's - man lifts the weapon, but only a few inches above the neck. The blow falls on the back of the neck, the executioner striking from above downward, occasionally expending the force of a blow on the |