cut over for forage. One great eminence was a
wonderful sight with its whole side smoothed by the sickles of
indomitable forage collectors. In some spots "fire farming" had been
or was still being practised. Here and there the cultivation of the
shrubs grown for the production of paper-making bark had displaced
"fire farming." I saw patches of millet and sweet potato which from
the road seemed almost inaccessible.

On the admirable main road we passed many pack ponies carrying immense
pieces of timber. Speaking of timber, the economical method of
preserving wood by charring is widely practised in Japan. The
palisades around houses and gardens and even the boards of which the
walls or the lower part of the walls of dwellings are constructed are
often charred. The effect is not cheerful. What does have a cheerful
and trim effect is a thing constantly under one's notice, the habit of
keeping carefully swept the unpaved earth enclosed by a house and
buildings as well as the path or roadway to them. This careful
sweeping is usually regarded as the special work of old people. Even
old ladies in families of rank in Tokyo take pleasure in their daily
task of sweeping.

When we had crossed the pass and descended on the other side and taken
_kuruma_ we soon came to a wide but absolutely dry river bed. The high
embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which,
walking behind our _kuruma_, it took us exactly four minutes to
cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the
floods that afflict the country. The rock-and rubble-choked condition
of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State
and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of
afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places
hillsides were pointed out to me which, bare a generation ago, are now
covered with trees. Within a distance of twenty-five miles hill
plantations were producing fruit to a yearly value of half a million
yen. As for the cultivation on either side of the roadway, along which
our _kurumaya_ were trotting us, I could not see a weed anywhere.

A favourite rural recreation in Ehime, as in Shimane on the mainland,
is bull fighting. It is not, however, fighting with bulls but between
bulls: the sport has the redeeming feature that the animals are not
turned loose on one another but are held all the time by their owners
by means of the rope attached to the nose ring. The rope