until the whole slope not
irreclaimable is made to blossom and the mountain torrents saved in
their descent, not tearing away the made ground, out of which the
means of living grows, but percolating through scores of narrow beds,
gardens suspended like extended ribbons of verdure on volcanic steeps,
refreshing the crops to be at last ripened by the sunshine. This is
a lesson for the American farmer--to be studied more closely than
imitated--to grow grass, especially clover, to stop devastation by
creeks, with shrubbery gifted with long roots to save the banks of
considerable streams, and, where there is stone, use it to save the
land now going by every freshwater rivulet and rivers to the seas, to
the irreparable loss of mankind. It is the duty of man who inherits
the earth that it does not escape from him, that his inheritance
is not swept away by freshets. We are growing rapidly, in America,
in the understanding of this subject, beginning to comprehend the
necessity of giving the land that bears crops the equivalent of that
which is taken from it, that the vital capital of future generations
may not be dissipated and the people grow ever poor and at last perish.

A ride in a jinrikisha, a two-wheeler, with a buggy top and poles
for the biped horse to trot between, from Nagasaki to a fishing
village over the mountains, five miles away, passing at the start
through the Japanese quarter, long streets of shops, populous and
busy, many diligent in light manufacturing work, and all scant in
clothing--the journey continuing in sharp climbs alongside steep places
and beside deep ravines, the slopes elaborately terraced, and again
skirting the swift curves of a rapid brook from the mountains, that
presently gathered and spread over pretty beds of gravel, providing
abundant fresh water bathing, in which a school of boys, leaving a
small guard for a light supply of clothing ashore--the ride ending
in a village of fishermen that, by the count of the inhabitants,
should be a town--permitted close observation of the Japanese in a
city and a village, on their sky-scraping gardens and in the road,
going to and coming from market, as well as in places of roadside
entertainment; and at last a seaside resort, in whose shade a party
of globetrotters were lunching, some of them, I hear, trying to eat
raw fish. There could hardly have been contrived a more instructive
exhibit of Japan and the Japanese. The road was obstructed in several