horse ever opens his mouth except to eat or to bite," and were only
convinced after I had put on the bridle myself. The new horses had
a rocking gait like camels, and I was glad to dispense with them at
Kisagoi, a small upland hamlet, a very poor place, with poverty-
stricken houses, children very dirty and sorely afflicted by skin
maladies, and women with complexions and features hardened by
severe work and much wood smoke into positive ugliness, and with
figures anything but statuesque.

I write the truth as I see it, and if my accounts conflict with
those of tourists who write of the Tokaido and Nakasendo, of Lake
Biwa and Hakone, it does not follow that either is inaccurate. But
truly this is a new Japan to me, of which no books have given me
any idea, and it is not fairyland. The men may be said to wear
nothing. Few of the women wear anything but a short petticoat
wound tightly round them, or blue cotton trousers very tight in the
legs and baggy at the top, with a blue cotton garment open to the
waist tucked into the band, and a blue cotton handkerchief knotted
round the head. From the dress no notion of the sex of the wearer
could be gained, nor from the faces, if it were not for the shaven
eyebrows and black teeth. The short petticoat is truly barbarous-
looking, and when a woman has a nude baby on her back or in her
arms, and stands staring vacantly at the foreigner, I can hardly
believe myself in "civilised" Japan. A good-sized child, strong
enough to hold up his head, sees the world right cheerfully looking
over his mother's shoulders, but it is a constant distress to me to
see small children of six and seven years old lugging on their
backs gristly babies, whose shorn heads are frizzling in the sun
and "wobbling" about as though they must drop off, their eyes, as
nurses say, "looking over their heads." A number of silk-worms are