We passed from this sense of exalted peace to plunge again into the crowded streets at night. It was late; we had many miles to go to catch the last train; two additional runners had been engaged for each _kuruma_--one to push, one to be harnessed in front.
Then began a furious ride. Mine was the last carriage. We were whirled along with warning cries of "Hai-hai!" now into the dark, then into some opening lighted by starlight, in which I could see the flitting shapes of the other runners and of my companions. I remember the creaking of their carriages, the jerking of them with each pull of the men; then our crossing suddenly other parties lighted by lanterns like ourselves, the lights flaring upon yellow faces and dark dresses and black hair; then our turning some narrow corner and plunging at full speed into lighted streets crowded with people, through whom we seemed to cut our way. Much shouting of our men, and dodging of wayfarers with lanterns and of bystanders who merely turn enough to let us glide by. Then one of my runners at full gallop struck a post and was left behind; another was gathered in somehow without a stop, and we tore through the city, still more crowded as we came nearer to our end--the railway station. We were in time, and we slept in the now familiar train. We reached the deserted station and were jogged peacefully to our hotel; our men, in Japanese fashion, sleepily turning out of the way of the ownerless dogs that lay in the middle of the streets. And when I awoke in the morning I found that the day's impressions had faded in sleep to what I tell you.
I have been asking myself whether it would be possible to have sensations as novel, to feel as perfectly fresh, things I knew almost all about beforehand, had we come in any other way, or arrived from any other quarter. As it is, all this Japan is sudden. We have last been living at home, are shut up in a ship, as if boxed in with our own civilization, and then suddenly, with no transition, we are landed in another. And under what splendor of light, in what contrasting atmosphere! It is as if the sky, in its variations, were the great subject of the drama we are looking at, or at least its great chorus. The beauty of the light and of the air is what I should like to describe, but it is almost like trying to account for one's own mood--like describing the key in which one plays. And yet I have not begun to paint, and I dread the moment of beginning to work again. Rather have I felt like yielding entirely to the spirit in which I came, the intention of a rest, of a bath for the brain in some water absolutely alien. A---- and I had undertaken that we should bring no books, read no books, but come as innocently as we could; the only compromise my keeping a scientific Japanese grammar, which, being ancient and unpractical, might be allowed, for it would leave me as unready as on the day I left.