oad to
Fukuoko is most excellent wheeling; the country continues charming, and
every day the people seem to get more and more polite and agreeable. A
novel sight of the morning's ride is a big gang of convicts working the
roads. They are fastened together with light chains, wear neat brown
uniforms, and seem to regard the unconvicted world of humans outside
their own company with an expression of apology. To look in their
serio-comic faces it is difficult to imagine them capable of doing
anything wrong, except in fun: they look, in fact, as if their being
chained together and closely attended by guards was of itself anything
but a serious affair.

Cavalry officers, small, smart-looking, and soldierly, in yellow-braided
uniforms, are seen in Fukuoko, looking as un-Asiatic in make-up as the
schools, policemen, and telegraph-operators. A collision with a
jinrikisha that treats me to a header, and another with a diminutive Jap,
that bowls him over like a ninepin, and a third with a bobtailed cat,
that damages nothing but pussy's dignity, enter into my reminiscences of
Fukuoko. The numbers of jinrikishas, and the peculiar habits of the
people, necessitate lynx-eyed vigilance to prevent collisions every hour
of the day. The average Jap leaves the door of a house backward, and bows
and scrapes his way clear out into the middle of the street, in bidding
adieu to the friends he has been calling upon, or even the shopkeeper he
has been patronizing. Scarcely a village is passed through but some
person waltzes backward out of a door and right in front of the bicycle.

A curious sight one frequently sees along the road is an acre or two of
ground covered with paper parasols, set out in the sun to dry after being
pasted, glued, and painted ready for market. Umbrellas and paper lanterns
are as much a part of the Japanese traveller's outfit as his clothes.
These latter, nowadays, are sometimes a very grotesque mixture of native
and European costume. The craze for foreign innovations pervades all
ranks of society, and every village dandy aspires to some article of
European clothing. The result is that one frequently encounters men on
the road wearing a Derby hat, a red blanket, tight-fitting white drawers,
and straw sandals. The villager who sports a European hat or coat comes
around to my yadoya, wearing an amusing expression of self-satisfaction,
as though filled with an inward consciousness of inv approval of the
same. Whereas, ever