"AN ACCOUNT OF THE NATIONAL CALAMITY OF 1855"

Thus runs the title of a rare Japanese book, rare because even color-prints, which portray all phases of life in Japan, seldom depict the horror of the earthquake or tidalwave that occasionally overwhelms the island kingdom. In this old book, however, we find prints by Yoshihoru which are, in spirit and in content, graphic descriptions of the disaster that the artist saw nearly seventy years ago

It would be difficult to imagine a craft more inadequate to cope with a tidal wave than helpless little beings who crowd the deck are terrified, as the Japanese text states or death will dispense their separate fates

one of these frail vessels of wood and bamboo and sail-cloth. No wonder that the

that they are, when that strange and appalling calamity overtakes them. Life whimsically, and no man knows what his will be

Under the menace of falling timber and sweeping flame a man is risking his life in a is hopeless. Dying as she is, she displays that pathetic and tenacious grip on the material holds out to her heartbroken friend a few personal treasures,

vain effort to save a victim of the earthquake. She, however, realizes that the attempt world which many show even in the last extremity. One hand is free, and in that she probably the hair ornament so dear to the Japanese woman