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230 HONDA THE SAMURAI.
temporary buildings of Yokohama became for the
time an industrial exhibition. Nearly all the Japanese
visitors, except those of high rank, took notes
or made sketches of what they saw, while the artists
were delighted with the superb colored plates of
Audubon's Birds and Quadrupeds of America, in
splendid folio volumes.
At the outdoor exhibitions of the little railway
thousands of people looked on with delight. The
four or five
tiny locomotive and tender were only
feet high, but every part of the machinery was perfect.
The passenger-cars were hardly big enough
to hold a child, but what the train lost in size it
made up hi speed, for the little engine, once started,
moved at the rate of twenty miles an hour. This
first train of cars in Japan was for passengers, not
for freight
;
but in order to get a ride the Japanese
commissioner had to sit on the roof, holding on to
the edges as he was swung round the circle, his
loose robes streaming and flapping in the March
wind. As for the telegraph, officers and people
never tired of hearing the click of the armature
and of getting instantaneous messages in Japanese,
Dutch, or Chinese ;
and these feats of the far-off
writers acted like belladonna in enlarging the eyes,
if
not the pupils, of the delighted folk.
As for "getting his picture taken," however, the
average native was more shy, since it was the firm
belief of many that a part of one's soul went into
the silvered plate of the camera. According to their
theory, after one has been " taken " a few score or