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212 of the Tonegawa. Many passengers contemplated the advisability of quitting the train and proceeding by relays of boat and rickshaw. Happily this troublesome alternative was avoided, and we contrived to reach the dull but important capital of the Rikuzen province shortly before midnight. The next morning we travelled by a branch line to Shiogama, the little port on the bay of Sendai from which passage is taken to the hamlet of Matsushima or the more distant Ishinomaki. We chose the latter route, since it traverses the entire archipelago and gives a more complete idea of the number and disposition of the Pine Islands. Legend counts them to be precisely eight hundred and eighty-eight, and, if one disappear, eaten by the sea, another pushes up its head, conveniently severed by a sword of water from some broken peninsula. As the rocks never increase nor diminish in number, so the thousand pine-trees, which start from crag or shelf in every conceivable posture, are never more nor less than one thousand. From this banquet of volcanic tufa the ravenous Pacific had crunched odd morsels, leaving for future meals bizarre and bitten fragments, as capricious in shape as its own appetite. Unfinished bastions, wild arches, irregularly tunnelled rocks, cone and staircase and plateau, lie densely or sparsely scattered over an expanse of forty miles, like a herd of amorphous sea-monsters, badly made and willingly abandoned to the solvent action of time and tide. But then, as if to apologise for the Originator's clumsiness and to prove that his failure may have been expressly intended to ensure their success, on the backs and in the crevices of the else uncouth stone creatures wave the thousand arms of pine, softening rough contours with their