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THREE:��I am afraid I am, sir,�� she said. ��But you kindly invited me to go to the luncheon and the opening of the new wing. I have been working ever since.����I enjoyed that afternoon I spent there,�� she said. ��They are kind, they are simple, and it is only simple people who count. I wonder if Lord Inverbroom gave the wing himself.��

THREE:FIRING DOWN THE HATCHWAY. FIRING DOWN THE HATCHWAY.As nearly as can be ascertained the first European who landed on Japanese[Pg 307] soil was Mendez Pinto, a Portuguese who combined the occupations of merchant and pirate in such intimate relations that it was not always easy for him to determine where the one ended and the other began. He has been greatly slandered, and his name has an ignoble place in history, as that of a champion liar. The fact is, that the stories he told on his return to Europe, and which caused him to be called "The Mendacious," were substantially correct��quite as much so as those of Marco Polo, and far more than the narrations of Sir John Mandeville. Pinto came with two companions to the island of Tanegashima in 1542, and, as might be expected, they were great curiosities. Even more curious were the fire-arms they carried; and they were invited to visit the Daimio of Bungo, and bring their strange weapons with them. They did so, and taught the natives how to make guns and powder, which soon became generally used throughout Japan. To this day fire-arms are frequently called "Tanegashima," after the island where Pinto landed with the first of these weapons. Christianity followed closely on the track of the musket. The adventurers returned with a profit of twelve hundred per cent. on their cargo. Their success stimulated others, and in 1549 two Portuguese missionaries, one of them being Francis Xavier, landed in Japan, and began the work of converting the heathen. Xavier's first labors were in Satsuma, and he afterwards went to Kioto and other cities. Personally he never accomplished much, as he could not speak the language fluently, and he remained in the country only a few years. But he did a great deal to inspire others; numbers of missionaries flocked to Japan, and it is said that thirty years after Xavier landed on the soil there were two hundred churches, and a hundred and fifty thousand native Christians. At the time of the highest success of the missionaries it is estimated that there were not less than half a million professing Christians in Japan, and perhaps another hundred thousand who were nominally so, though their faith was not regarded as[Pg 308] more than "skin deep." Among the adherents of the new religion there were several Daimios, and a great number of persons occupying high social and official positions. Some of the Daimios were so zealous that they ordered their people to turn Christians whether they wished it or not; and one of them gave his subjects the option of being baptized or leaving the country within twenty-four hours.

THREE:"A good many of these punishments precede a much more merciful one, that of decapitation. The victim who is to suffer the loss of his head is carried to the place of execution in a small cage of bamboo, with his hands tied behind him, and the crime for which he is to suffer written on a piece of stiff paper and fastened to his hair. In one corner of the cage is a bucket, which is to hold his head after the executioner has cut it off; and frequently the pail with the head in it is hung near one of the gates of the city or in some other public place. When he reaches the execution-ground, he is required to kneel, and the executioner strikes his head off with a single blow of a heavy sword. The poor fellows who are to suffer death rarely make any opposition, and some of them seem quite willing to meet it. This is said to be due partly to the calmness of the Chinese, and partly to the fact that they have been so tortured and starved in their imprisonment that it is a relief to die. In most of the Chinese prisons the men condemned to death are usually kept until there are several on hand; then a general execution is ordered, and the whole lot of them are taken out to the place of decapitation. During the time of the rebellion they used to have executions by wholesale, and sometimes one or two hundred heads were taken off in a single morning.