RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
for safety, and so we rolled soggily along, with no other sound but the rattle of many wheels and the splash of mud, until we arrived at the Fujiya Hotel, sometime after ten o’clock, in a state of utter exhaustion.
I am not going to describe Miyanoshita because it has been very well done by scores of writers, but I will say that the Fujiya Hotel, away up in the mountains, at the head of a glorious canyon, is one of the most splendidly situated, finely managed and wholly delightful places I ever saw.
And there are plenty of things to do. We were carried in chairs over a high mountain pass to Lake Hakone, which, still and bright as a plate-glass mirror, lies right at the base of Fujiyama and reflects that startlingly beautiful mountain in perfect colour and form.
Then there are temples and wayside shrines, and tea-houses—tea-houses everywhere. We were coming back from a tramp one day and stopped at a tea-house not far from our hotel where we encountered an Englishwoman who gave us our first conception of what the terrible Boxer Insurrection was like. She entered into talk with us at once and told us a most tragic story. She was a missionary from the interior of China and had been forced to flee before the Boxers and make her way out of the country in hourly peril and through scenes of the utmost horror. Her husband had elected to remain at his post and she didn’t then know but that he might already have died under the worst imaginable torture. She made our blood run cold and we were tremendously sorry for her, though she did tell her harrowing story calmly enough. It seems she had with her a young Chinese refugee who was a convert to Christianity and, because of that fact, in even more danger in China than she.
We expressed our sympathy and good wishes and continued on our way. But we hadn’t gone far when we heard a frantic shouting behind us:
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