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�We've toiled through the forest with unceasing strife,And gained the bright snow-line at last.

These runners are in the employ of the men who supply live fish for the tables of those who live at a distance from the sea or from the lakes, and are willing to pay for the luxury. A runner stands waiting, and the instant the fish is in his charge he is off. If the distance is great, there are relays of men stationed along the route; and so the precious merchandise goes forward from one to the other without a moment's delay. Only the wealthy can afford this mode of transporting fish, as the cost is often very heavy. Some of the princes, in the olden time, were in the habit of eating fresh fish at their tables every day that had been brought in this way for a hundred and fifty miles. Great quantities of fish are still carried in this primitive manner, but not for such long distances as formerly. Many fish are transported on horseback, in barrels of water; but the most delicate and valuable are borne only on the shoulders of men, as the jolting of a horse will soon kill them.��

"Oh, how innocent you always are! Look here! just tell me this; was it the Major's brother brought it, or was it Ned Ferry?"[Pg 355]From this assertion there was no dissent. Then the question naturally arose, "How is the operation performed?"

�CHAPTER XXIV."And so these things come here in cans, do they?" Frank inquired.

PILGRIMS ON THE ROAD. PILGRIMS ON THE ROAD.It was agreed that a day should be given to amusements, and these should include anything that the boys and their tutor could find. Frank went in pursuit of the landlord of the hotel, and soon returned with the information that there was a theatrical performance that very day in the native theatre, and also a wrestling match which was sure to be interesting, as the Japanese wrestlers are different from those of any other country. After a little discussion it was determined that they would first[Pg 228] go to the wrestling match, and Frank should write a description of the wrestlers and what they did. After the wrestling match was disposed of, they would take up the theatre, and of this Fred should be the historian.

� "The decline in Portuguese trade with China was accompanied with a corresponding decline in the language, but it left its impress upon the more recent pidgin English, which contains many Portuguese words. Pidgin English is a language by itself, with very little inflection either in noun, pronoun, or verb, and with a few words doing duty for many. The Chinese learn it readily, as they have no grammatical giants to wrestle with in mastering it, and the foreigners are quite ready to meet them on the road and adapt their phraseology to its requirements. The Chinese has only to commit to memory a few hundred words and know their meaning; the foreigner (if he be English-speaking) has less than a hundred foreign words to learn, together with the peculiar construction of phrases. The Chinese have printed vocabularies in which the foreign word and its meaning are set forth in Chinese characters, and thus they have no occasion to trouble themselves with the alphabet of the stranger. These books are specially intended for the use of compradores and servants in foreign employ, and are so small that they can be readily carried in the pocket."Who, me? Oh!--I--I admire Ned Ferry--for a number of things. He's more foolhardy than brave; he's confessed as much to me. Women call him handsome. He sings; beautifully, I suppose; I can't sing a note; and wouldn't if I could. Still, if he only wouldn't sing drinking-songs --but, Smith, I think that to sing drinking-songs--and all the more to sing them as well as some folks think he does--is to advocate drinking, and to advocate drinking is next door to excusing drunkenness!"

They had three or four hours to spare before sunset, and at once set about the business of sight-seeing. Their first visit was to the temple on the island, and they were followed from the landing by a crowd of idle people, who sometimes pressed too closely for comfort. There was an avenue of trees leading up to the temple, and before reaching the building they passed under a gateway not unlike those they had seen at the[Pg 406] temples in Kioto and Tokio. The temple was not particularly impressive, as its architectural merit is not of much consequence, and, besides, it was altogether too dirty for comfort. There was quite a crowd of priests attached to it, and they were as slovenly in appearance as the building they occupied. In the yard of the temple the strangers were shown the furnaces in which the bodies of the priests are burned after death, and the little niches where their ashes are preserved. There were several pens occupied by the fattest pigs the boys had ever seen. The guide explained that these pigs were sacred, and maintained out of the revenues of the temple. The priests evidently held them in great reverence, and Frank intimated that he thought the habits of the pigs were the models which the priests had adopted for their own. Some of the holy men were at their devotions when the party arrived, but they dropped their prayer-books to have a good look at the visitors, and did not resume them until they had satisfied their curiosity."In the administration of justice," Doctor Bronson continued, "Japan has made great progress in the past few years. Formerly nearly all trials were conducted with torture, and sometimes the witnesses were tortured as well as the accused. The instruments in use were the refinement of cruelty: heavy weights were piled on the body of a prisoner; he was placed in a caldron of water, and a fire was lighted beneath which slowly brought the water to the boiling-point; he was cut with knives in a variety of ways that indicated great ingenuity on the part of the torturers; in fact, he was put to a great deal of pain such as we know nothing about. Under the old system the only persons at a trial were the prisoner, the torturer, the secretary, and the judge; at present the trials are generally open, and the accused has the benefit of counsel to defend him, as in our own courts. Torture has been formally abolished, though it is asserted that it is sometimes employed in cases of treason or other high crimes. Law-schools have been established, reform codes of law have been made, and certainly there is a manifest disposition on the part of the government to give the best system of justice to the people that can be found. Japan is endeavoring to take a place among the nations of the world, and show that she is no longer a barbarian land. The United States have been the foremost to acknowledge her right to such a place, but their action has not been seconded by England and other European countries. It will doubtless come in time, and every year sees some additional step gained in the proper direction.�

"The Chinese find great difficulty in pronouncing r, which they almost invariably convert into l. They have a tendency to add a vowel sound (o or e) to words ending with a consonant. Bearing these points in mind, we readily see how 'drink' becomes dlinko, and 'brown' blownee. Final d and t are awkward for them to handle, and th is to their lips an abomination of first-class dimensions. 'Child' becomes chilo, and 'cold' is transformed to colo, in pidgin English. 'That,' and other words beginning with th, generally lose the sound of h, though sometimes they retain h and drop the t before it. 'Side' is used for position, and the vocabulary contains inside, outside, bottom-side (below), and top-side (above). Chop-chop means 'fast,' 'quick,' 'immediately;' man-man means 'slowly,' 'slower,' 'gently,' in the south of China; while at Han-kow, on the Yang-tse, it means exactly the reverse. At Canton or Swatow, if you say man-man to your boatmen, they will cease rowing or will proceed very lightly; say the same thing to your boatmen at Han-kow or Ichang, and they will pull away with redoubled energy."�"The wrestlers were the largest men I have seen in Japan; and the fact is I didn't suppose the country contained any men so large. As near as I could see, they had more fat than muscle on them; but there must have been a good deal of muscle, too, for they were strong as oxen. Doctor Bronson says he has seen some of these wrestlers carry two sacks of rice weighing a hundred and twenty-five pounds each, and that one man carried a sack with his teeth, while another took one under his arm and turned somersets with it, and did not once lose his hold. The Doctor says these men are a particular race of Japanese, and it used to be the custom for each prince to have a dozen or more of these wrestlers in his suite to furnish amusement for himself and his friends. Sometimes two princes would get up a match with their wrestlers, just as men in New York get up matches between dogs and chickens. Then there were troupes of wrestlers, who went around giving exhibitions, just as they sometimes do in America. But you never saw such fat men in all your life as they were; not fat in one place, like the man that keeps the grocery on[Pg 230] the corner of the public square in our town, but fat all over. I felt the back and arms of one of them, and his muscles were as hard as iron. The flesh on his breast was soft, and seemed like a thick cushion of fat. I think you might have hit him there with a mallet without hurting him much.

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