rried off in recent years.

I was in Chiba several times and I remember to have noticed one winter
day with what considered roughness the paddies had been dug in order
to receive from frost and sun the benefits which are as good as a
manuring. Some notion of the strength of the weather forces at work
may be gathered from the fact that, though I was walking without an
overcoat and was glad to shade my eyes by pulling down the brim of my
hat, the frost of the two previous nights had produced ice on the
paddies an inch thick.

Sometimes at the irrigation reservoirs one may see notice boards
announcing that these water areas are stocked with _koi_ (carp). This
fish is also kept in the paddies. The carp are put in as yearlings or
two-year-olds, when the paddies are flooded, and a score out of every
hundred come out in the autumn--assuming the happiest conditions--ten
inches or so long. Carp culture flourishes in the sericulture
districts, where the pupae which remain when the cocoons are unwound
are thrown to the fish; but pupae fed carp have a flavour which
diminishes their value. Indeed paddy-field fish, which on the whole
must have a rather troubled existence, do not bring the price of river
carp. Other fish than carp, eels for instance, are also kept in
paddies.[206]

I visited a vigorous personality who was at once a landowner and
rural oculist, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He
had graduated at Tokyo and had kept himself abreast of German
specialist literature. There was accommodation for about a hundred
patients in the buildings attached to his house. He believed in the
efficacy in eye cases of "the air of the rice fields," not to speak of
the shrine which overlooks the patients' quarters. As the number of
blind people in Japan is appalling,[207] it was interesting to hear
the opinion that the chief causes were gonorrhoea, inadequate attention
at birth, insufficient nourishment in childhood and nervous
disease--all more or less preventible. Nearly a quarter of my host's
patients had had their eyes wounded by rice-stem points while stooping
in the paddies. As the people are hurt in the busy season they often
put off coming for help until it is too late.

The landowner-oculist's premises were lighted by natural gas from a
depth of 900 ft. According to a fellow-guest, who happened to be an
expert in this matter, natural gas is to be had all over Japan.[208]

The room in which I slept belonged to