Jinrikisha Days in Japan
perishable. With the exception of the four Pacific Mail steamers running to San Francisco, English ships carry all this tea to American markets. The tea steamers discharging cargo at New York usually load there for Liverpool, and arrive in Japan in time for the next season, or sometimes make two trips to New York in one season. While the tea is moving freights are high, but in the autumn they decline. One or two sailing ships take entire cargoes of tea to Tacoma each season, and send them across the continent by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The greatest market for Japan teas in America is now centering at Chicago instead of New York, and prophetic tea-merchants expect to have San Francisco become the headquarters and great distributing point.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE INLAND SEA AND NAGASAKI
In making six trips through the Inland Sea I have seen its beautiful shores by daylight and moonlight and in all seasons—clothed in the filmy green of spring, golden with ripened grain or stubble, blurred with the haze of midsummer heat, and clear in the keen, midwinter winds that, sweeping from the encircling mountains, sting with an arctic touch.
My first sail on its enchanted waters was a September holiday, the dim horizon and purple lights prophesying of the autumn. From sunrise to dark, shadowy vistas opened, peaceful shores slipped by, and heights and islands rearranged themselves. The coast of south-eastern Alaska is often compared to the Inland Sea, but the narrow channels, wild cañons, and mountain-walls of the Alaska passage have no counterpart in this Arca-
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