March 9th, 1873. Fine.

When dawn broke, the train was already travelling through the province of Brandenburg, across a still broader plain with the occasional stretch of marshland. We were now in the county of Potsdam, to the west of Berlin, an area of picturesque lakes and marshes. The fields this morning were covered in white frost, and there was a biting chill in the air. At seven o'clock we reached Berlin to find the minister plenipotentiary [Sameshima Naonobu], the secretaries from the legation and a party of Japanese students all waiting at the station to meet us. People in Germany are punctilious in showing respect to their emperor and obeying the government, so when they heard of the arrival of our Embassy, the professors of the Japanese students allowed them to absent themselves from classes in order to call on us at our official residence. Even those lodging in outlying districts gathered in the city for the occasion. If the students had failed to come on the grounds that our visit was unrelated to their studies, the professors would have criticised them for neglecting their duty. In Britain and America, on the contrary, people had found the efforts of Japanese students to welcome and see us off amusing, so sentiments vary from one country to the next.