uction of rats. Of recent years the county
agricultural association had given 5 yen per _tan_ to farmers who
planted improved sorts of mulberry. About half the farmers in the
county had manure houses. Some 800 farmers in the county kept a
labourer.

I went to see a _guncho_ and read on his wall: "Do not get angry.
Work! Do not be in a hurry, yet do not be lazy." "These being my
faults," he explained, "I specially wrote them out." There was also on
his wall a _kakemono_ reading: "At twenty I found that even a plain
householder may influence the future of his province; at thirty that
he may influence the future of his nation; at forty that he may
influence the future of the whole world." Below this stirring
sentiment was a portrait of the writer, a samurai scholar, from a
photograph taken with a camera which he had made himself. He lived in
the last period of the Shogunate and studied Dutch books. He was
killed by an assassin at the instance, it was believed, of the Shogun.

One of the noteworthy things of Matsumoto was the agricultural
association's market. Another piece of organisation in that part of
the world was fourteen institutes where girls were instructed in the
work of silk factory hands. The teachers' salaries were paid by the
factories. So were also the expenses of the silk experts of the local
authorities. On the day I left the city the daily paper contained an
announcement of lectures on hygiene to women on three successive days,
"the chief of police to be present." This paper was demanding the
exemption of students from the bicycle tax, the rate of which varies
in different prefectures.

A young man was brought to see me who was specialising in musk melons.
He said that the Japanese are gradually getting out of their
partiality for unripe fruit.

On our way to the Suwas we saw many wretched dwellings. The feature
of the landscape was the silk factories' tall iron chimneys,
ordinarily black though sometimes red, white or blue.

It is not commonly understood that Japanese lads by the time they
"graduate" from the middle school into the higher school have had some
elementary military training. A higher-school youth knows how to
handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target. At Kami Suwa the
problem of how middle-class boys should procure economical lodging
while attending their classes had been solved by self-help. An
ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded
to build on a