level or slightly rolling fields in America.  There was not a spot from first to last visible in Japan, as seen from the water, or in an excursion on the land, where there is room to turn around a horse and plow.  The ground is necessarily turned up with spades and mellowed with hoes and cakes, all, of course, by human hands.  This is easy compared with the labor in constructing terraces.  The mountains have been conquered to a considerable extent in this way, and it is sensational to see how thousands of steep places have been cut and walled into gigantic stairways, covering slopes that could hardly answer for goat pasture, until the shelves with soil placed on them for cultivation have been wrought, and the terraces are like wonderful ladders bearing against the skies.  So rugged is the ground, however, that many mountains are unconquerable, and there are few traces of the terraces, though here and there, viewed from a distance, the evidences that land is cultivated as stairways leaning against otherwise inaccessible declivities.  I have never seen elsewhere anything that spoke so unequivocably of the endless toil of men, women and children to find footings upon which to sow the grain and fruit that sustain life.  It is not to be questioned that the report, one-twelfth, only of the surface of Japan is under tillage, is accurate.  The country is more mountainous than the Alleghenies, and some of it barren as the wildest of the Rockies on the borders of the bad lands, and it is volcanic, remarkably so, even more subject to earthquakes than the Philippines.  The whole of Japan occupies about as much space as the two Dakotas or the Philippines, and the population is forty-two millions.  With work as careful and extensive as that of the agricultural mountaineers of Japan, the Dakotas would support one hundred million persons.  But they would have to present the washing away of the soil and the waste through improvident ignorance or careless profligacy of any fertilizer, or of any trickle of water needed for irrigation.  One of the features of the terraces is that the rains are saved by the walls that sustain the soil, and the gutters that guide the water conserve it, because paved with pebbles and carried down by easy stages, irrigating one shelf after another of rice or vegetables, whatever is grown, until the whole slope not irreclaimable is made to blossom and the mountain torrents saved in their descent, not tearing away the made ground, out of which the means of living grows, but percolating through scores of narrow beds, gardens suspended like extended ribbons of verdure on volcanic steeps, refreshing the crops to be at last ripened by the sunshine.  This is a lesson for the American farmer—­to be studied more closely than imitated—­to grow grass, especially clover, to stop devastation by creeks, with shrubbery gifted with long roots to save the banks of considerable streams, and, where there is stone, use it to save the land now going by every freshwater rivulet and rivers to the seas,