Around the World on a Bicycle Volume Ii Part 33

The summit reached, the Tokaido now leads through glorious pine-woods, descending toward the valley of the Sakawagawa by a series of breakneck zigzags. The region is picturesque in the extreme; a small mountain-stream tumbles along through a deep ravine on the left, mountains tower aloft on the other side, and here and there give birth to a cataract that tumbles and splashes down from a height of several hundred feet.

By 1 p.m. Yomoto and the recommencement of the jinrikisha road is reached; a broiled fish and a bottle of native beer are consumed for lunch, and the kago coolies dismissed. The road from Yomoto is a gradual descent, for four miles, to Odawara, a town of some thirteen thousand inhabitants, on the coast. The road now becomes level and broader than heretofore; vehicles drawn by horses mingle with the swarms of jinrikishas and pedestrians. Both horses and drivers of the former seem sleepy, woe-begone and careless, as though overcome with a consciousness of being out of place.

Gangs of men are dragging stout hand-carts, loaded with material for the construction of the Tokaido railway, now rapidly being pushed forward.

Every mile of the road is swarming with life--the strangely interesting life of j.a.pan. Thirty miles from Yomoto, and Totsuka provides me a comfortable yadoya, where the people quickly show their knowledge of the foreigner's requirements by cooking a beefsteak with onions, also in the morning by charging the first really exorbitant price I have been confronted with along the Tokaido. Totsuka is within the treaty limits of Yokohama. A mile or so toward Yokohama I pa.s.s, in the morning, the "White Horse Tavern," kept in European style as a sort of road-house for foreigners driving out from that city or Tokio.

A fierce wind, blowing from the south, fairly wafts me along the last eleven miles of the Tokaido, from Totsuka to Yokohama. The wind, indeed, has been generally favorable since the rain-storm at Okabe, but it fairly whistles this morning. It calls to mind the Kansas wheelman, who claimed to have once spread his coat-tails to the breeze and coasted from Lawrence to Kansas City in three hours. Unfortunately I am wearing a coat the pattern of which does not admit of using the tails for sails otherwise the homestretch of the tour around the world might have provided one of the most unique incidents of the many I have encountered on the journey.

A battery of field-artillery, the smartest seen since leaving Germany, is encountered in the streets of Kanagawa, at which point the road to Yokohama branches off from the Tokaido. The great Imperial highway, along which I have travelled from the old capital almost to the new, continues on to the latter, seventeen miles farther. Since the completion of the railway between Tokio and Kanagawa, travellers journeying from the capital down the Tokaido usually ride on the train to Kanagawa, so that the jinrikisha journey proper nowadays commences at the latter city.

Kanagawa is practically a suburban part of Yokohama: one j.a.panese-owned clock observed here points to the hour of eight, another to eleven, and a third to half past-nine, but the clock at the Club Hotel, on the Yokohama bund, is owned by an Englishman, and is just about striking ten, when the last vault from the saddle of the bicycle that has carried me through so many countries is made. And so the bicycle part of the tour around the world, which was begun April 22, 1884, at San Francisco, California, ends December 17, 1886, at Yokohama.

At this port I board the Pacific mail steamer City of Peking, which in seventeen days lands me in San Francisco. Of the enthusiastic reception accorded me by the San Francis...o...b..cycle Club, the Bay City Wheelmen, and by various clubs throughout the United States, the daily press of the time contains ample record. Here, I beg leave to hope that the courtesies then so warmly extended may find an echoing response in this long record of the adventures that had their beginning and ending at the Golden Gate.