like an avenging Fate, bent on
preventing the consummation of my tour from being too agreeable. Even
with rain and mud and consequent delays my first few days in Japan have
seemed a very paradise after my Chinese experiences; what, then, would
have been my impressions of country and people amid sunshine and
favorable conditions of weather and road, when the novelty of it all
first burst upon my Chinese-disgusted senses?

The country round about is mountainous, snow lying upon the summits of a
few of the higher peaks. The road, though hilly at times, manages to
twist and wind its way along from one little valley to another without
any very long hills. Peasants from the mountains are met with, leading
ponies loaded with firewood and rice. Their old Japanese aboriginal
costumes of wistaria raincoats, broad bamboo-hats, and rude straw-sandals
make a conspicuous contrast to their countrymen of "New Japan," in Derby
hats or jockey suits. Notwithstanding the rapid Europeanizing of the
city-bred Japs, the government's progressive policy, the blue-coated
gendarmerie, and the general revolutionizing of the country at large,
many a day will come and go ere these mountaineers forsake the ways and
methods and grotesque costumes of their ancestors. For decades Japan will
present an interesting study of mountaineer conservatism and
ultra-liberal city life. One party will be wearing foreign clothes, aping
foreign manners, adopting foreign ways of doing everything; the other
will be clinging tenaciously to the wistaria garments, bamboo sieve-hats,
straw-sandals, and the traditions of "Old Japan."

Most farm-houses are now thatched with straw; one need hardly add that
they are prettily and neatly thatched, and that they are embellished by
various unique contrivances. Some of them, I notice, are surrounded by a
broad, thick hedge of dark-green shrubbery. The hedge is trimmed so that
the upper edge appears to be a continuation of the brown thatch, which
merely changes its color and slopes at the same steep gradient to the
ground. This device produces a very charming effect, particularly when a
few neatly trimmed young pines soar above the hedge like green sentinels
about the dwelling. One inimitable piece of "botanical architecture"
observed to-day is a thick shrub trimmed into an imitation of a mountain,
with trees growing on the slopes, and a temple standing in a grove.
Before many of the houses one sees curious tree-roots or rocks, that