inducement for sitting up by the dimness of candle or andon, and I
have found these days of riding on slow, rolling, stumbling horses
very severe, and if I were anything of a walker, should certainly
prefer pedestrianism. I. L. B.



LETTER XII



A Fantastic Jumble--The "Quiver" of Poverty--The Water-shed--From
Bad to Worse--The Rice Planter's Holiday--A Diseased Crowd--Amateur
Doctoring--Want of Cleanliness--Rapid Eating--Premature Old Age.

KURUMATOGE, June 30.

After the hard travelling of six days the rest of Sunday in a quiet
place at a high elevation is truly delightful! Mountains and
passes, valleys and rice swamps, forests and rice swamps, villages
and rice swamps; poverty, industry, dirt, ruinous temples,
prostrate Buddhas, strings of straw-shod pack-horses; long, grey,
featureless streets, and quiet, staring crowds, are all jumbled up
fantastically in my memory. Fine weather accompanied me through
beautiful scenery from Ikari to Yokokawa, where I ate my lunch in
the street to avoid the innumerable fleas of the tea-house, with a
circle round me of nearly all the inhabitants. At first the
children, both old and young, were so frightened that they ran
away, but by degrees they timidly came back, clinging to the skirts
of their parents (skirts, in this case, being a metaphorical