child being
born in the first months of a young couple's marriage. Someone
mentioned, however, that the girls who went to the silk factories
were, as a consequence of their life there, "debased morally and
physically."

A notable thing in the village was four fires, two the month before we
arrived and two while we were there. They were suspected to have been
the work of a person of weak intellect. (As in our own villages half a
century ago, there is in every community at least one "natural.") On
the night of the first fire we were awakened about 3 a.m. by shouting,
by the clanging of the fire bell and by the booming of the great bell
in the temple yard. The fire was about four houses away. It was a
still night and the flames and sparks went straight up. As the
possibility of the wind shifting and the fire spreading could not be
entirely excluded we quickly got our more important possessions on the
_engawa_--at least a young maidservant did so. The continual
experience which the Japanese have of fires makes them self-possessed
on these occasions, and this girl had _futon_, bags, etc., neatly tied
in big _furoshiki_ (wrapping cloths) in the shortest possible time. It
was only when she was satisfied that our belongings were in readiness
for easy removal that she went to look after her own. The
matter-of-fact, fore-sighted, neat way in which she got to work was
admirable. With great kindness one of the elders of the village came
hurriedly to the temple, evidently thinking we should feel alarmed,
and cried out, "_Yoroshii, Yoroshii_" ("All right").

[Illustration: FIRE ALARM AND OBSERVATION POST]

As I stood before the blaze what struck me most was the orderliness
and quiet of the crowd and the way in which whatever help was needed
was at once forthcoming without fuss. The fire brigades were working
in an orderly way and everything was so well managed that the scene
seemed almost as if it were being rehearsed for a cinema. One
difference between what I saw and what would be seen at home at a fire
was that the scene was well lighted from the front, for the members of
the fire brigades carried huge lanterns on high poles. From the mass
of old wet reed in the roadway I judged that the first act of the
firemen had been to use their long hooks to denude the roof of the
burning house of its thatch, which in the lightest wind is so
dangerous to surrounding dwellings. Nobody in the village is insured,
but the neighbours seem to