e as wrestlers.

I had often noticed bulls drawing carts and behaving as sedately as
donkeys, but it was new to see a bull tethered at the roadside with
children playing round it. Why are the Japanese bulls so friendly?

In the mountainous regions we passed through I saw several paddies no
bigger than a hearthrug. At one spot a land crab scurried across the
road. It was red in colour and about 2-1/2 ins. long.

At a village office the headman's gossip was that priests had been
forbidden by the prefecture to interfere in elections. We looked
through the expenses of the village agricultural association. For a
lecture series 5 yen a month was being paid. Then there had been an
expenditure by way of subsidising a children's campaign against
insects preying on rice. For ten of the little clusters of eggs one
may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the
reward was 2 rin. The association spent a further 10 yen on helping
young people to attend lectures at a distance. The commune in which
those things had been done numbered 3,100 people. There had been two
police offences during the year, but both offenders were strangers to
the locality.

In a cutting which was being made for the new railway, girl labourers
were steering their trucks of soil down a half-mile descent and
singing as they made the exhilarating run. The building of a railway
through a closely cultivated and closely populated country involves
the destruction of a large amount of fertile land and the rebuilding
of many houses. The area of agricultural land taken during the
preceding and present reigns, not only for railways and railway
stations but for roads, barracks, schools and other public buildings,
has been enormous. "The owner of land removed from cultivation may
seem to do well by turning his property into cash," a man said to me.
"He may also profit to some extent while the railway is building by
the jobs he is able to do for the contractor, with the assistance of
his family and his horse or bull; but afterwards he has often to seek
another way of earning his living than farming."

We neared railhead on a market day and many folk in their best were
walking along the roads. Of fourteen umbrellas used as parasols to
keep off the sun that I counted one only was of the Japanese paper
sort; all the others were black silk on steel ribs in "foreign style"
except for a crude embroidery on the silk.

When we got into the town it was a