and are covered with shingles held on by laths and weighted with
large stones. Nearly all the houses look like temporary sheds, and
most are as black inside as a Barra hut. The walls of many are
nothing but rough boards tied to the uprights by straw ropes.

In the drowning torrent, sitting in puddles of water, and drenched
to the skin hours before, we reached this very primitive yadoya,
the lower part of which is occupied by the daidokoro, a party of
storm-bound students, horses, fowls, and dogs. My room is a
wretched loft, reached by a ladder, with such a quagmire at its
foot that I have to descend into it in Wellington boots. It was
dismally grotesque at first. The torrent on the unceiled roof
prevented Ito from hearing what I said, the bed was soaked, and the
water, having got into my box, had dissolved the remains of the
condensed milk, and had reduced clothes, books, and paper into a
condition of universal stickiness. My kimono was less wet than
anything else, and, borrowing a sheet of oiled paper, I lay down in
it, till roused up in half an hour by Ito shrieking above the din
on the roof that the people thought that the bridge by which we had
just entered would give way; and, running to the river bank, we
joined a large crowd, far too intensely occupied by the coming
disaster to take any notice of the first foreign lady they had ever
seen.

The Hirakawa, which an hour before was merely a clear, rapid
mountain stream, about four feet deep, was then ten feet deep, they
said, and tearing along, thick and muddy, and with a fearful roar,


"And each wave was crested with tawny foam,