much, though the choice was only between a slow walk and the
lumbering gallop aforesaid.

I met strings of horses loaded with deer hides, and overtook other
strings loaded with sake and manufactured goods and in each case
had a fight with my sociably inclined animal. In two villages I
was interested to see that the small shops contained lucifer
matches, cotton umbrellas, boots, brushes, clocks, slates, and
pencils, engravings in frames, kerosene lamps, {18} and red and
green blankets, all but the last, which are unmistakable British
"shoddy," being Japanese imitations of foreign manufactured goods,
more or less cleverly executed. The road goes up hill for fifteen
miles, and, after passing Nanai, a trim Europeanised village in the
midst of fine crops, one of the places at which the Government is
making acclimatisation and other agricultural experiments, it
fairly enters the mountains, and from the top of a steep hill there
is a glorious view of Hakodate Head, looking like an island in the
deep blue sea, and from the top of a higher hill, looking
northward, a magnificent view of the volcano with its bare, pink
summit rising above three lovely lakes densely wooded. These are
the flushed scaurs and outbreaks of bare rock for which I sighed
amidst the smothering greenery of the main island, and the silver
gleam of the lakes takes away the blindness from the face of
nature. It was delicious to descend to the water's edge in the
dewy silence amidst balsamic odours, to find not a clattering grey
village with its monotony, but a single, irregularly-built house,
with lovely surroundings.

It is a most displeasing road for most of the way; sides with deep
corrugations, and in the middle a high causeway of earth, whose