esided for a couple of years
in an English family. Her name, she says, is O-hanna, but her English
friends used to call her Hannah, without the prefix. Understanding from
experience what I would be most likely to appreciate for supper, she
rustles around and prepares a nice fish, plenty of Ureshino tea, sugar,
sweet-cakes, and sliced pomolo; this, together with rice, is the extent
of Ushidzu's present gastronomic limits.

The following morning opens with a white frost, the road is level and
good, and the yadoya people see that I am provided with a substantial
breakfast in good season. My boots, I find, have been cleaned even. They
were cleaned with a rag, O-hanna apologizing for the absence of
shoe-brushes and blacking in pidgeon English: "Brush no have got."

In striking contrast to China, here are gangs of "cantonniers" taking
care of the road; men in regular blue uniforms with big white
"bull's-eyes," and characters like our Celestial friends the
yameni-runners. Troops of school-children are passed on the road going to
school with books and tally-boards under their arm. They sometimes range
themselves in rows alongside the road, and, as I wheel past, bob their
heads simultaneously down to the level of their knees and greet me with a
polite "O-ai-o."

The country hereabout is rich and populous, and the people seemingly
well-to-do. The tea-houses, farm-houses, and even the little ricks of
rice seem built with an eye to artistic effect. One sees here the gradual
encroachment of Western mechanical improvements. The first two-handled
plough I have seen since leaving Europe is encountered this morning; but
alongside it are men using the clumsy Japanese digging-tool of their
ancestors, and both men and women stripped to the waist, hulling rice by
pounding it in mortars with long-headed pestles. It is merely a question
of a few years, however, until the intelligent Japs will discard all
their old clumsy methods and introduce the latest agricultural
improvements of the West into their country. Passing through a mile or
more of Saga's smooth and continuously ridable streets, past big
school-houses where hundreds of children are reciting aloud in chorus,
past the big bronze Buddha for which Saga is locally famous, the road
continues through a somewhat undulating country, ridable, generally
speaking, the whole way. Long cedar or cryptomerian avenues sometimes
characterize the way. Strings of peasants are encountered, leading