re opaque, and it is easy to remove them for
refilling before they are quite empty.

The brewer, who was a firm adherent of the Jishu sect of Buddhists,
was accustomed to burn incense with his family at the domestic shrine
every morning. But this was not the habit of all the adherents of his
denomination. As to the moral advancement of the neighbourhood, his
grandfather "tried very earnestly to improve the district by means of
religion, but without result." He himself attached most value to
education and after that to young men's associations.

As we left the town we passed a "woman priest" who was walking to
Nikko, eighty miles away. Portraits of dead people, entrusted to her
by their relatives for conveyance to distant shrines, were hung round
her body.

As the route became more and more hilly I realised how accurate is
that representation of hills in Japanese art which seems odd before
one has been in Japan: the landscape stands out as if seen in a flash
of lightning.

Three things by the way were arresting: the number of shrines, mostly
dedicated to the fox god; the rice suspended round the farm buildings
or drying on racks; and the masses of evening primroses, called in
Japan "moon-seeing flowers."

A feature of every village was one or more barred wooden sheds
containing fire-extinguishing apparatus, often provided and worked by
the young men's association. Sometimes a piece of ground was described
to me as "the training ground of the fire defenders." The night
patrols of the village were young fellows chosen in turn by the
constable from the fire-prevention parties, made up by the youths of
the village. There stood up in every village a high perpendicular
ladder with a bell or wooden clapper at the top to give the alarm. The
emblem of the fire brigade, a pole with white paper streamers
attached, was sometimes distinguished by a yellow paper streamer
awarded by the prefecture.

On a sweltering July day it was difficult to realise that the villages
we passed through, now half hidden in foliage, might be under 7 ft. of
snow in winter. In travelling in this hillier region one has an extra
_kurumaya_, who pushes behind or acts as brakeman.

At the "place of the seven peaks" we found a stone dedicated to the
worship of the stars which form the Plough. Again and again I noticed
shrines which had before them two tall trees, one larger than the
other, called "man and wife." It was explained to me that "there
can