areas devoted to lotus, but the big floating
leaves were not yet illumined by the mysterious beauty of the
honey-scented flowers.

In order to imagine the scene on the rice flats, the reader must not
think of the glistering paddy fields[136] as stretching in an unbroken
monotonous series over the plain. Occasionally a rocky patch,
outcropping from the paddy tract, made a little island of wood.
Sometimes it was a sacred grove in which one caught a glimpse of a
Shinto shrine or the head stones of the dead. Sometimes there was a
little clump of cropped tree greenery which kept a farmhouse cool in
summer and, at another time of the year, sheltered from the wind. Few
householders were too poor or too busy to be without their little
patch of flowers.

Before the train climbed out of the Kwanto plain temperature of not
far below 100 deg. F. the planting of rice seemed to be almost an enviable
occupation. The peasant had his great umbrella-shaped straw hat,
sometimes an armful of green stuff tied on his back, and a delicious
feeling of being up to the knees in water or mud on a hot day-one
recalled the mud baths of the West-when the alternative was walking on
a dusty road, digging on the sun-baked upland or perspiring in a house
or the train.

With the rise in the level a few mulberries began to appear and
gradually they occupied a large part of the holdings. Sometimes the
mulberries were cultivated as shoots from a stump a little above
ground level, and sometimes as a kind of small standard. As mulberry
culture increased, the silk factories' whitewashed cocoon stores and
the tall red and black iron chimneys of the factories themselves
became more numerous. It is a pity that the silk factory is not always
so innocent-looking inside as the pure white exterior of its stores
might suggest. It is certain that the overworked girl operatives,
sitting at their steaming basins, drawing the silk from the soaked
cocoons, were glad to find the weather conditions such that they could
have the sides of their reeling sheds removed.

At many of the railway stations there were stacks of large, round,
flat bean cakes, for the farmer feeds his "cake" to his fields direct,
not through the medium of cattle. Although a paddy receives less
agreeable nutritive materials than bean cake, the extensive use of
this cake must be comforting to a little school of rural reformers in
the West. These ardent vegetarians have refused to listen to the
alleg