is impoverished, the school is comfortless and a thousand tombstones
in the ancient burying ground among the trees are half hidden in moss
and undergrowth.

The farm rents now charged in Oiwaké had not been changed for thirty,
forty or fifty years. In the old inn there was a Shinto shrine, about
12 ft. long by nearly 2 ft. deep, with latticed sliding doors. It
contained a dusty collection of charms and memorials dating back for
generations. Outside in the garden at the spring I found an irregular
row of half a dozen rather dejected-looking little stone _hokora_
about a foot high. Some had faded _gohei_ thrust into them, but from
the others the clipped paper strips had blown away. At the foot of the
garden I discovered a somewhat elaborate wooden shrine in a
dilapidated state. "Few country people," someone said to me, "know who
is enshrined at such a place." It is generally thought that these
shrines are dedicated to the fox. But the foxes are merely the
messengers of the shrine, as is shown by the figures of crouching or
squatting foxes at either side. A well-known professor lately arrived
at the conviction that the god worshipped at such shrines is the god
of agriculture. He went so far as to recommend the faculty of
agriculture at Tokyo university to have a shrine erected within its
walls to this divinity, but the suggestion was not adopted.

In the course of another chat with the old host of the inn he referred
to the time, close on half a century ago, when 3,000 hungry peasants
marched through the district demanding rice. They did no harm. "They
were satisfied when they were given food; the peasants at that time
were heavily oppressed." To-day the people round about look as if they
were oppressed by the ghosts of old-time tyrants. But there is
"something that doth linger" of self-respect. When we left on our way