cobwebs hung from the uncovered rafters. The mats were brown with
age and dirt, the rice was musty, and only partially cleaned, the
eggs had seen better days, and the tea was musty.

I saw everything out of doors with Ito--the patient industry, the
exquisitely situated village, the evening avocations, the quiet
dulness--and then contemplated it all from my balcony and read the
sentence (from a paper in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society)
which had led me to devise this journey, "There is a most
exquisitely picturesque, but difficult, route up the course of the
Kinugawa, which seems almost as unknown to Japanese as to
foreigners." There was a pure lemon-coloured sky above, and slush
a foot deep below. A road, at this time a quagmire, intersected by
a rapid stream, crossed in many places by planks, runs through the
village. This stream is at once "lavatory" and "drinking
fountain." People come back from their work, sit on the planks,
take off their muddy clothes and wring them out, and bathe their
feet in the current. On either side are the dwellings, in front of
which are much-decayed manure heaps, and the women were engaged in
breaking them up and treading them into a pulp with their bare
feet. All wear the vest and trousers at their work, but only the
short petticoats in their houses, and I saw several respectable
mothers of families cross the road and pay visits in this garment
only, without any sense of impropriety. The younger children wear
nothing but a string and an amulet. The persons, clothing, and
houses are alive with vermin, and if the word squalor can be
applied to independent and industrious people, they were squalid.
Beetles, spiders, and wood-lice held a carnival in my room after
dark, and the presence of horses in the same house brought a number
of horseflies. I sprinkled my stretcher with insect powder, but my