RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
yama on screens and fans and porcelains all my life, but I had no conception of it. For one half hour this "Queen of Mountains"—rightly called—rising thirteen thousand feet out of sheer sea-level, perfect in form, snow-capped, majestic, blazed for us against the western sky. Then a cloud curtain fell,—and the sun went down.
As we steamed up close to the breakwater in the grey light of late evening we could see nothing but the dark outlines of many ships and a long row of substantial looking buildings, under high arc lights, stretching along a wide, water-front street which I was afterward to know as The Bund.
We wanted to go ashore, but it was not possible. We had to lie outside the breakwater and wait for the doctors to come aboard. "Wait for the doctors to come aboard;" how familiar that proceeding becomes to the traveller among the ports of the East, and especially, of Japan. You arrive at Yokohama and are examined there; you go just around the bend of the coast line and arrive at Kobe and you are examined there; you go on through the Inland Sea to Nagasaki and again you are examined. Wherever you arrive in this land of much caution you must "wait for the doctors to come aboard."
But our doctors didn't keep us waiting long. About eight o'clock half a dozen of them, important little men with much gold-lace, came smiling up the gangway. We worried, rather, about a plague we had braved,—and we did hope none of our crew would develop symptoms,—but, having faith in the Japanese Vice-Consul in Honolulu, we hoped for special leniency. We were not disappointed. They examined the ship's company with great care, but our examination was a mere formality, a sort of apologetic enumeration as a matter of fact, and after giving us a clean bill of health the doctors bowed themselves most courteously away. But we had a narrow escape. Charlie's nurse developed a suspicious sore throat the very next afternoon and gave us many days
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