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 committed harakiri, is still preserved at the temple of Sengakuji in Yedo, while swords alleged to have belonged to Minamoto no Yoritomo and to Taiko Hidéyoshi are to this day shown at the temple of Hachiman at Kamakura.

It was the writer’s good fortune, in the spring of the present year, to pay a visit to the famous shrines of Nikko, in the province of Shimotsuké. The highest mountain of that cluster of hills is called Nantaisan, and has been considered for many ages a sacred place. Upon this mountain are several small torii, or gateways, such as are seen leading up to Japanese temples, and these guide the traveller to a small shrine at the summit. Here, on a bare rock overhanging a steep precipice some sixty or seventy feet in depth, lay, half-buried in the snow, a large number of sword-blades, old and rusted, which had evidently lain there exposed to the wind and rain for many years back. Tradition says that, in old days, any one who had committed a deed of blood with any weapon, was accustomed to make a pilgrimage to this mountain, and there fling away the instrument as a sort of expiation for his crime. The guides on the spot, however, stated that though this was doubtless true in many cases, still it was not an absolute fact. Among the sword-blades there lay one, broken into three pieces, but which when whole must have been not less than eight feet in length. This sword bore a date of some twenty-one years back, and the maker’s name, Izawa Gijirô, who turned out to be a smith late of renown in the castle-town of Utsunomiya, some few miles off. Many a tale of blood, no doubt, could those old blades have told, had they a voice; but there they lay, as still as the hands that once wielded them, fitting emblems of the decay, in these days, of that once deep-rooted pride which was wont to cherish the sword, under the belief that it was the source of manly spirit, and the very fountain of honour.

The different ways of carrying the sword are stated by some Japanese to have been indicative of the rank of the wearer. Thus, persons of high birth are said