It was a lovely summer day, though very hot, and the snowy peaks of Aizu scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the sunlight.
The plain of Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in the south, and the frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is a perfect garden of Eden,"tilled with a pencil instead of a plough, "growing in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tabacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants, walnuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates;a smiling and plenteous land, and an Asiatic Arcadia.