disposed pack-horses, and a number of travellers, crossed in a
flat-bottomed boat. The boatmen, travellers, and cultivators, were
nearly or altogether without clothes, but the richer farmers worked
in the fields in curved bamboo hats as large as umbrellas, kimonos
with large sleeves not girt up, and large fans attached to their
girdles. Many of the travellers whom we met were without hats, but
shielded the front of the head by holding a fan between it and the
sun. Probably the inconvenience of the national costume for
working men partly accounts for the general practice of getting rid
of it. It is such a hindrance, even in walking, that most
pedestrians have "their loins girded up" by taking the middle of
the hem at the bottom of the kimono and tucking it under the
girdle. This, in the case of many, shows woven, tight-fitting,
elastic, white cotton pantaloons, reaching to the ankles. After
ferrying another river at a village from which a steamer plies to
Tokiyo, the country became much more pleasing, the rice-fields
fewer, the trees, houses, and barns larger, and, in the distance,
high hills loomed faintly through the haze. Much of the wheat, of
which they don't make bread, but vermicelli, is already being
carried. You see wheat stacks, ten feet high, moving slowly, and
while you are wondering, you become aware of four feet moving below
them; for all the crop is carried on horses' if not on human backs.
I went to see several threshing-floors,--clean, open spaces outside
barns,--where the grain is laid on mats and threshed by two or four
men with heavy revolving flails. Another method is for women to
beat out the grain on racks of split bamboo laid lengthwise; and I
saw yet a third practised both in the fields and barn-yards, in
which women pass handfuls of stalks backwards through a sort of
carding instrument with sharp iron teeth placed in a slanting
position, which cuts off the ears, leaving the stalk unbruised.