bring coolness, but myriads of flying, creeping, jumping, running
creatures, all with power to hurt, which replace the day
mosquitoes, villains with spotted legs, which bite and poison one
without the warning hum. The night mosquitoes are legion. There
are no walks except in the streets and the public gardens, for
Niigata is built on a sand spit, hot and bare. Neither can you get
a view of it without climbing to the top of a wooden look-out.

Niigata is a Treaty Port without foreign trade, and almost without
foreign residents. Not a foreign ship visited the port either last
year or this. There are only two foreign firms, and these are
German, and only eighteen foreigners, of which number, except the
missionaries, nearly all are in Government employment. Its river,
the Shinano, is the largest in Japan, and it and its affluents
bring down a prodigious volume of water. But Japanese rivers are
much choked with sand and shingle washed down from the mountains.
In all that I have seen, except those which are physically limited
by walls of hard rock, a river-bed is a waste of sand, boulders,
and shingle, through the middle of which, among sand-banks and
shallows, the river proper takes its devious course. In the
freshets, which occur to a greater or less extent every year,
enormous volumes of water pour over these wastes, carrying sand and
detritus down to the mouths, which are all obstructed by bars. Of
these rivers the Shinano, being the biggest, is the most
refractory, and has piled up a bar at its entrance through which
there is only a passage seven feet deep, which is perpetually
shallowing. The minds of engineers are much exercised upon the
Shinano, and the Government is most anxious to deepen the channel
and give Western Japan what it has not--a harbour; but the expense
of the necessary operation is enormous, and in the meantime a