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HONDA THE
SAMURAI.
CHAPTER I.
THE CITY OF THE HAPPY WELL.
"TTTHAT would be the feelings of an " heir of all
VV the ages," and especially of an American
lad of the nineteenth century, were he to leap out of
the present into the thirteenth century? His feelings
would have been ours, had we arrived in Fukui,
in Echizen, Japan, after a journey from Osaka via
Lake Biwa and the mountains, in the year of our
Lord 1852. Here was the capital city of a feudal
province which long ago, and for centuries, had been
the center of war, the castle having been often taken
and retaken in blood and fire ;
but during the last
two hundred and seventy years there had been no
more quiet spot in the Land of Great Peace.
Life in a Japanese city,
to one fresh from the
intense life and energies of an American metropolis,
would have been like existence in the thirteenth
century. Society was so simple ; there were but two
classes, the governing samurai and the governed
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