fact, I shall always cite my unparalleled experience to-day. At the luncheon of your secretary, that amiable lady, who sits at table with me here, pleased me with her china service; I happened to tell her it reminded me of home. What was my surprise and gratification to find that your accomplished president, at whose house I was dining a few hours later on--to whom no doubt my remark had been repeatedhad, at such very short notice, managed to duplicate the set of china I had commended! And now, again, what can I say? Words indeed fail me when, at the hospitable board of your admirable treasurer, I find a third set of my favorite porcelain. The resources of you Americans really do surprise me. Such a compliment, so conceived, so carried out, has never been paid to me before. Need I say that it goes to my inmost-"

Mr. Bludgeon stopped. He had heard a giggle of hilarity that could no longer be repressed. The company, among whom Simonson and his belongings had of

course been under free discussion ever since they had sat down to the tables, fairly exploded with delight.

Mr. Bludgeon hemmed, hawed, colored finally took his seat. Mrs. Stratton hastily left the room. Mrs. Grindstone and Miss Bennett sat on, mute, unrevealing as two Sphinxes-but evidently not offended beyond hope of recovery.

Some time after Mr. Bludgeon's visit to Sutphen had begun to pass into tradition, poor Simonson's establishment in Main Street was shut up. He had dragged along for some time, but, lacking customers, had finally decided to pack up his "onionpattern" china and the rest, and had emigrated to a field more promising for a caterer's operations. The day of his great success had proved his Waterloo.

Mrs. Grindstone is now the president of the Sutphen Literary Club-vice Mrs. Chauncey Stratton resigned and gone abroad. Miss Bennett is still the secretary. Mr. Grindstone's gas bills remain reasonably low.

T the date of the expulsion of the Spaniard and the Portuguese from Japan, a new nation was begun by the Pilgrims at the edge of the North American wilderness. Two centuries later, in 1837, the unarmed ship Morrison, sent by an American firm in China to take back Japanese waifs into Yedo Bay, was fired on and driven away. "Why," asked the owner, "is the sentence of expulsion passed so long ago upon the Spaniards and Portuguese entailed upon us?" It is creditable to the Great Pacific Power, as President Arthur named the United States, that her very first ships carried the olivebranch. Beside the apostles of gainful trade, our country sent missionaries, physicians, and teachers, planting churches, hospitals, schools, and colleges. In the empire of China, first peacefully opened to American commerce by Shaw, and in Japan and Korea, both led into the world's brotherhood of nations by Perry and Shu

feldt, blood has been spilled by our people only in self-defence or after provocation.

I. EARLY EPISODES IN CHINA. THE Dutch and British East India Companies opened the eyes of Americans to the rich harvest-fields of trade whitening in the Far East. It was American ginseng that first, through the Hollanders in the Hudson Valley, made the Chinese practically aware of and interested in The Country of the Flowery Flag." It was the Chinese leaf, tea, shipped from Amoy on British merchantmen, that precipitated the Revolutionary war, bringing about that event of July 4. 1776, which has ever since required an endless supply of Chinese fire-crackers to celebrate it.

No sooner was peace concluded between Great Britain and the United States than the ship Empress, loaded with ginseng, and commanded by Captain Green, sailed from New York on Washington's birth

day, February 22, 1784, for Canton. Ma jor Samuel Shaw, her supercargo and exartillery officer in the United States army, established American trade in Canton. In the ship Massachusetts he returned, and was American consul from 1790 to 1794. The exchange of ginseng and tea, and afterwards of cotton and crockery, became lively and permanent. Captain Gray carried the American flag round the world between 1787 and 1790, during which time he discovered the Columbia River, thus making a basis for the American claims, and opening the way for barter of the furs of Oregon for the silks of China.

The first passage at arms between American citizens and Chinese was in 1809, when Mr. J. P. Sturgis, of Boston, arrived in the ship Atahualpa. Captain Bacon, at Macao. The terrible Chinese pirate Apoot sae was then ravaging the coast, capturing imperial forts, laying whole towns under contribution, massacring those who opposed him, and terrorizing the mandarins. In vain were rewards offered for his head. Having watched and seen the chief officer and an armed boat's crew leaving the Atahualpa for the city to obtain a river pilot, he thought the capture of the foreign devil's ship would be easy. Ranging his junks under color of moving up the river, and feigning to run past the American ship, the pirates suddenly rounded, expecting to leap on board and kill the eigh teen or twenty men left there. Instead of quick success, the Chinaman caught a Tartar. Astounded as the Yankees were, their cannon were fortunately loaded, and they made lively use of them, and with Brown Bess muskets, horse - pistols, and boarding-pikes, defended themselves with spirit. The Chinese threw on deck plenty of those home-made hand-grenades which, owing to the quantity of sulphur in the powder, were unpoetically termed stink pots," but they killed none of their foes. Amid the shrieks and groans of their wounded, a hellish din with gongs and drums was kept up. The Yankees fired with such effect that the Chinese were beaten off. Apootsae called away his men, and his ships were soon lost to sight. This episode put such courage into the cowardly mandarins that, by means of bribery and treachery, they secured the cutthroat Apootsae, and had him put to death by the slow and prolonged process of hacking, called the thousand cuts." From this time forth there was intense respect for

Americans at Canton and Macao, and business increased with little interruption.

II. EARLY VISITS TO JAPAN. THE American flag was seen in Japanese waters as early as 1797, at a time when the future Commodore M. C. Perry and his brother Oliver, boys of three and twelve years old, trained by their Spartan mother, were learning how to conquer self before capturing a squadron and opening a hermit empire. Over-fat Holland, then neither brave nor little, but distracted and bleating like a fat sheep before Napoleon the wolf, had been degraded into the Batavian Republic. The Dutch flag was wiped off the sea, for British cruisers were at the ends of the earth. In order to keep up their trade monopoly with Japan, the Dutch of Java engaged Captain Stewart, on the ship Eliza of New York, to go to a place of which-except in Swift's Gulliver's Travels-few Americans had ever heard. Thus the thirteen stripes and seventeen stars were mirrored on the waters of Nagasaki Bay when President Jefferson was in Japanese eyes the "King of America." In 1799 Captain James Devereaux, in the American ship Franklin, performed the same task. When the nineteenth century opened, Captain John Derby, from Salem, Massachusetts, under charter of the East India Company, attempted to open trade with Japan, but failed. In 1803, Stewart, still flying the American flag, came again to this loop-hole which the Japanese kept open by means of the Dutch. Except ginseng, the Japanese wanted none of our products.

Japanese art pictures in symbol the primal introduction of civilization into their "Cliff Fortress Country "by means of a whale, and the god of literature has a brush-pen in one hand and a roll or pad of manuscript in the other, while he stands in festive attitude on the back of a huge sea-monster. In reality it was a whale that introduced the Americans to Japan, and ushered in her present amazing prosperity. In search of this furnisher of oil and bone, American ships moved out beyond Nantucket southward, around Cape Horn, and up the Pacific. Though the blubber industry was nearly destroyed by the Revolutionary war, it revived. By 1812 our men of the harpoon were so numerous in the Pacific Ocean that Commodore David Porter, in the Essex, with David Farragut among his midshipmen,

tured for the despatch of a frigate and two sloops of war; but the

vessels were never sent. Now began the long story of the impris

COMMODORE MATTHEW CALBRAITH PERRY. A Japanese portrait, with a poem by Yashida Shoin.

was sent out to protect Yankee whalers from British depredation. Already some had gone far north, bringing back stories of how the little brown men of Japan caught whales as they do yet-in big nets. Commodore Porter, in 1815, urged upon Secretary James Monroe that Japan be opened to commerce, and plans were ma

onment of shipwrecked American sailors on the coasts of Tycoonland. John Quincy Adams denied the right of Dai Nippon to be a hermit nation, but his was a voice crying in the wilderness.

Neither our government nor people seemed to be properly interested in foreign commerce, much

less in any naval application of the doctrine of "manifest destiny" or territorial expansion.

III. THE ADVENT OF AMERICAN
POWER IN THE PACIFIC.

WHEN Andrew Jackson became President, the United States began to formulate something like a foreign policy. Commo

dore David Porter made treaties

with Turkey. The French and

the Neapolitans were compelled to pay their debts. One of the most brilliant of American naval operations in the Mediterranean was seen when six of the finest floating fortresses in the world, under Old Glory," entered successively the Bay of Naples, and ranged their broadsides opposite the beautiful city of King Bomba. Changing his attitude of haughty refusal to pay, he handed over in cash what he owed the United States for his father's depredations.

Even Asia felt the new influence from Washington. Edmund Roberts, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire-posthumously, and perhaps truthfully, called in stained-glass memorial the "ambassador of the United States, but officially President Jackson's "agent," and navally rated as captain's clerk-became our efficient first American envoy in the Far East. On the sloop of war Peacock, after overcoming great obstacles, he made treaties with Muscat and Siam. In Cochin China he failed, where success was impossible. In the expectation of reaching Japan, he died June 12, 1836, at Macao. In August of the next year Commodore Kennedy, in the United

States sloop Peacock, reached those islands one of which Captain Reuben Coffin, of Nantucket, had already named, but which were called by the Japanese Bonin, or "no man's land," for they were then claimed by no gov ernment. Since 1876 the Bonin group has been made an integral part of the Mikado's empire. The Peacock was our first man-of-war in Japanese waters, the forerunner of Dewey and his steel squadron.

Americans took up the torch dropped by Roberts to bear it on in the race. Messrs. King and Co., of Macao, in their own ship, appropriately named after the great missionary Morrison, reached Uraga, in Yedo Bay, July 29, 1837. Their freight consisted of shipwrecked Japanese and presents for the people. As on William Penn's colonizing ships, there was not a gun or cannon aboard. The story of their repulse is soon told. Though they explained their mission, and were visited by hundreds of people who saw their unarmed condition, they were fired on before casting anchor, and again the next morning from a fresh battery of cannon built overnight. The same experience met them in Satsu

TOWNSEND HARRIS,

United States Consul-General to Japan.

COMMANDER JAMES GLYNN, Of the United States Brig "Preble."

ma, farther south. In the eyes of the Japanese, the Spaniard and Portuguese had tarred all aliens with the same brush.

By the time of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too, American naval operations had become so far organized that there was an "East India squadron." The United States ship of the line Columbus and the Vincennes reached Yedo Bay in 1846, but were at once surrounded by scores of armed boats. To the polite letter of President Polk, an answer of impudent defiance was returned, and Commodore Biddle was insulted. While in full uniform, stepping from a junk, a common Japanese sailor gave the American chief a push which landed him unceremoniously in the bottom of his own boat. Japanese officers promised to punish the man, but nothing was done, and the American ships went away. The immediate result was that the American shipwrecked sailors -who were not indeed always of the loveliest disposition-were more cruelly treated than ever. One of them, on threatening possible vengeance from American men-of-war, was sneeringly told that his government could care nothing for poor seamen, for a Japanese