to scholars at this school, I
found, was 10 sen per month during the first compulsory six years and
30 sen during the next two years.

Just after Christmas I walked again into the country. There were miles
of dreary brown paddies with the stubble in puddles. On the non-paddy
land there was the refreshing green of young corn which seemed greatly
to enjoy being treated as a garden plant in a deep exquisitely worked
soil with never a weed in an acre. But children were kept from school
because their parents could not get along without their help. Many of
the school teachers seemed as poor as the farmers. As I passed the
farm-houses in the evening they seemed bleak and uninviting. In the
fire hole[214] of every house, however, there was a generous blaze and
the bath tub out-of-doors was steaming for the customary evening hot
dip in the opening.

In my host's house I noticed an old painting of a forked _daikon_.
Such malformed roots used to be presented to shrines by women desirous
of having children.

In the office of one village I visited I was permitted to examine the
dossiers of some of the inhabitants. Among a host of other particulars
about a certain person's origin and condition I read that he was a
minor when his father died, that such and such a person acted as his
guardian, that the guardianship ended on such and such a date, and
that his widowed mother had a child nine years after her husband's
death.

In not a few places I found that the tiny shrines of hamlets (_aza_)
had been taken away and grouped together at a communal shrine with the
notion of promoting local solidarity. At one such combination of
shrines I saw notice boards intimating that "tramps, pedlars,
wandering priests and other carriers of subscription lists and
proselytisers" were not received in the village. It was explained that
a community was sometimes all of one faith: "therefore it does not
want to be disturbed by tactless preachers of other beliefs."

At an inn there was a middle-aged widow who served there as waitress
in the summer but in the winter returned to Tokyo, where she employed
a number of girls in making _haori_ tassels. (She gave them board and
lodging and clothes for two years, and, after that period,
wages.[215]) Remembering what I had written down about courting, I
asked for her mature judgment on our rural custom of "walking out."
She was amused, but, in that way the Japanese have of trying to look
at a Western custom on