s attempts to get the horse-hirer to let us have the
horses a few hours earlier. In spending time in long conversations
mixed with civilities and bows the Japanese are masters. Of this bad
habit, which still often makes the European desperate, it will not
perhaps be long necessary to complain, for everything indicates that
the Japanese too will soon be carried along at the endlessly roaring
speed of the Steam Age.

When we had at last got horses we continued our journey, first in a
carriage to Tokio, then by rail to Yokohama, arriving there on the
afternoon of the 6th October. From this journey I shall only relate
an incident which may form a little picture throwing light on life
in Japan.

While we halted for a short time in the morning of the 6th October
at a large inn by the roadside, we saw half a dozen young girls
finishing their toilets in the inn-yard. In passing we may say, that
a Japanese peasant girl, like girls in general, may be pretty or the
reverse, but that she generally is, what cannot always be said of
the peasant girls at home, cleanly and of attractive manners. They
washed themselves at the stream of water in the inn-yard, smoothed
their artistically dressed hair, which, however, had been but little
disturbed by the cushions on which they had slept, and brushed their
dazzlingly white teeth. Soap is not used for washing, but a cotton
bag filled with bran. The teeth were brushed with a wooden pin, one
end of which was changed by beating into a brush-like collection of
wooden cords. The tooth-powder consisted of finely powdered shells
and corals, and was kept in small, neat wooden boxes, which, along
with tooth-brushes and small square bundles of a very strong and
cheap paper, all clearly intended for the use of the peasants, were
sold for a trifle in most of the innumerable shops along the road.
For such stupid regulations as in former times in Europe rendered
traffic in the country difficult, and often obliged the countryman
to betake himself to the nearest town to buy some horse-shoes or a
roll of wire, appear not to be found in Japan, on which account most
of the peasants living on a country road seek a subsidiary way of
making a living by trafficking in small articles in request among
the country people.

Incidents of the sort referred to we had seen so many times before
that on this occasion it would not have attracted any further
attention on our part, if we had not thereby been reminded that