Musashi plain used to be before trains hurried one, or otherwise,
into the heart of the land. In those days the journey was done in
jinrikisha, and a question of days, not hours, it was in the doing,
--two days' worth of baby carriage, of which the tediousness lay
neither in the vehicles nor in the way, but in the amount of both.
Or, if one put comparative speed above comparative comfort, he rose
before the lark, to be tortured through a summer's day in a basha,
or horse vehicle, suitable only for disembodied spirits. My joints
ached again at the thought. Clearly, to grumble now was to sin
against proportion.

Besides, the weather was perfect: argosies of fleecy cloud sailing
slowly across a deep blue sky; a broad plain in all its spring
freshness of color, picked out here and there with fruit trees
smothered in blossom, and bearing on its bosom the passing shadows of
the clouds above; in the distance the gradually growing forms of the
mountains, each at first starting into life only as a faint wash of
color, barely to be parted from the sky itself, pricking up from out
the horizon of field. Then, slowly, timed to our advance, the tint
gathered substance, grew into contrasts that, deepening minute by
minute, resolved into detail, until at last the whole stood revealed
in all its majesty, foothill, shoulder, peak, one grand chromatic
rise from green to blue.

One after the other the points came out thus along the southern sky:
first the summits behind Ome; then Bukosan, like some sentinel,
half-way up the plain's long side; and then range beyond range
stretching toward the west. Behind Bukosan peeped Cloud's Rest, the
very same outline in fainter tint, so like the double reflection
from a pane of glass that I had to shift to an open window to make