Sir Harry Parkes—An “Ambassador’s Carriage”—Cart Coolies.
YOKOHAMA, _May_ 22.
TO-DAY has been spent in making new acquaintances, instituting a search
for a servant and a pony, receiving many offers of help, asking questions
and receiving from different people answers which directly contradict
each other. Hours are early. Thirteen people called on me before noon.
Ladies drive themselves about the town in small pony carriages attended
by running grooms called _bettos_. The foreign merchants keep _kurumas_
constantly standing at their doors, finding a willing, intelligent coolie
much more serviceable than a lazy, fractious, capricious Japanese pony,
and even the dignity of an “Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister
Plenipotentiary” is not above such a lowly conveyance, as I have seen
to-day. My last visitors were Sir Harry and Lady Parkes, who brought
sunshine and kindliness into the room, and left it behind them. Sir
Harry is a young-looking man scarcely in middle life, slight, active,
fair, blue-eyed, a thorough Saxon, with sunny hair and a sunny smile, a
sunshiny geniality in his manner, and bearing no trace in his appearance
of his thirty years of service in the East, his sufferings in the prison
at Peking, and the various attempts upon his life in Japan. He and Lady
Parkes were most truly kind, and encourage me so heartily in my largest
projects for travelling in the interior, that I shall start as soon as I
have secured a servant. When they went away they jumped into _kurumas_,
and it was most amusing to see the representative of England hurried down
the street in a perambulator with a tandem of coolies.
As I look out of the window I see heavy, two-wheeled man-carts drawn and
pushed by four men each, on which nearly all goods, stones for building,
and all else, are carried. The two men who pull press with hands and
thighs against a cross-bar at the end of a heavy pole, and the two who
push apply their shoulders to beams which project behind, using their
thick, smoothly-shaven skulls as the motive power when they push their
heavy loads uphill. Their cry is impressive and melancholy. They draw
incredible loads, but, as if the toil which often makes every breath a
groan or a gasp were not enough, they shout incessantly with a coarse,
guttural grunt, something like _Ha huida_, _Ho huida_, _wa ho_, _Ha
huida_, etc.