ther that I fled Myanoshita.
A blue-breeched dwarf thrust me into a dwarf 'rickshaw on spidery
wheels, and down the rough road that we had taken four hours to climb
ran me clamorously in half an hour. Take all the parapets off the Simla
Road and leave it alone for ten years. Then run down the steepest four
miles of any section,--not steeper than the drop to the old Gaiety
Theatre,--behind one man!

"We couldn't get six hill-men to take us in this style," shouted the
Professor as he spun by, his wheels kicking like a duck's foot, and the
whole contraption at an angle of thirty. I am proud to think that not
even sixty hill-men would have gambolled with a sahib in that
disgraceful manner. Nor would any tramway company in the Real East have
run its cars to catch a train that used to start last year, but
now--rest its soul--is as dead as Queen Anne. This thing a queer little
seven-mile tramway accomplished with much dignity. It owned a
first-class car and a second-class car,--two horses to each,--and it ran
them with a hundred yards headway--the one all but empty, and the other
half full. When the very small driver could not control his horses,
which happened on the average once every two minutes, he did not waste
time by pulling them in. He screwed down the brake and laughed--possibly
at the company who had paid for the very elaborate car. Yet he was an
artistic driver. He wore no Philistine brass badge. Between the
shoulders of his blue jerkin were done in white, three railheads in a
circle, and on the skirts as many tram-wheels conventionalised. Only
the Japanese know how to conventionalise a tram-wheel or make a
key-pattern of railheads. Though we took twelve hours to cover the
thirty miles that separated us from Yokohama, we admitted this much
while we waited for our train in a village by the sea. A village of any
size is about three miles long in the main street. Villages with a
population of more than ten thousand souls take rank as towns.

"And yet," said a man at Yokohama that night, "you have not seen the
densest population. That's away in the western _kens_--districts, as you
call them. The folk really are crowded thereabouts, but virtually
poverty does not exist in the country. You see, an agricultural labourer
can maintain himself and his family, as far as rice goes, for four cents
a day, and the price of fish is nominal. Rice now costs a hundred pounds
to the dollar. What do you make it by Indian standards? Fr