sold sweet-meats, dried fish, pickles, mochi, or uncooked cakes of
rice dough, dried persimmons, rain hats, or straw shoes for man or
beast. The road, though wide enough for two carriages (of which we
saw none), was not good, and the ditches on both sides were
frequently neither clean nor sweet. Must I write it? The houses
were mean, poor, shabby, often even squalid, the smells were bad,
and the people looked ugly, shabby, and poor, though all were
working at something or other.

The country is a dead level, and mainly an artificial mud flat or
swamp, in whose fertile ooze various aquatic birds were wading, and
in which hundreds of men and women were wading too, above their
knees in slush; for this plain of Yedo is mainly a great rice-
field, and this is the busy season of rice-planting; for here, in
the sense in which we understand it, they do not "cast their bread
upon the waters." There are eight or nine leading varieties of
rice grown in Japan, all of which, except an upland species,
require mud, water, and much puddling and nasty work. Rice is the
staple food and the wealth of Japan. Its revenues were estimated
in rice. Rice is grown almost wherever irrigation is possible.

The rice-fields are usually very small and of all shapes. A
quarter of an acre is a good-sized field. The rice crop planted in
June is not reaped till November, but in the meantime it needs to
be "puddled" three times, i.e. for all the people to turn into the
slush, and grub out all the weeds and tangled aquatic plants, which
weave themselves from tuft to tuft, and puddle up the mud afresh
round the roots. It grows in water till it is ripe, when the
fields are dried off. An acre of the best land produces annually
about fifty-four bushels of rice, and of the worst about thirty.