feeling of being up to the knees in water or mud on a hot day-one
recalled the mud baths of the West-when the alternative was walking on
a dusty road, digging on the sun-baked upland or perspiring in a house
or the train.

With the rise in the level a few mulberries began to appear and
gradually they occupied a large part of the holdings. Sometimes the
mulberries were cultivated as shoots from a stump a little above
ground level, and sometimes as a kind of small standard. As mulberry
culture increased, the silk factories' whitewashed cocoon stores and
the tall red and black iron chimneys of the factories themselves
became more numerous. It is a pity that the silk factory is not always
so innocent-looking inside as the pure white exterior of its stores
might suggest. It is certain that the overworked girl operatives,
sitting at their steaming basins, drawing the silk from the soaked
cocoons, were glad to find the weather conditions such that they could
have the sides of their reeling sheds removed.

At many of the railway stations there were stacks of large, round,
flat bean cakes, for the farmer feeds his "cake" to his fields direct,
not through the medium of cattle. Although a paddy receives less
agreeable nutritive materials than bean cake, the extensive use of
this cake must be comforting to a little school of rural reformers in
the West. These ardent vegetarians have refused to listen to the
allegation that vegetarianism was impossible because without
meat-eating there would be no cattle and therefore no nitrogen for the
fields.

It was not only the bean cakes at the stations which caught my
attention but the extensive use of lime. Square miles of paddy field