a halt of several hours.  Everything is so delightfully superior, as compared with China, that the Japanese village yadoya seems a veritable paradise during these first days of my acquaintance with them.  Life at a Chinese village hittim for a week would well-nigh unseat the average Anglo-Saxon’s reason, whereas he might spend the same time very pleasantly in a Japanese country inn.  The region immediately around Takio is not only naturally lovely, but is embellished by little artificial lakes, islands, grottoes, and various landscape novelties such as the Japs alone excel in.

An eight-wire telegraph line threads the road from Takio to Ushidzu, passing through numerous villages that almost form a continuous street from one town to the other.  As one notices such improvements, and sees the police and telegraph officials in trim European uniforms seated in their neat offices, an American clock invariably on the wall within, and, moreover, notes the uniform friendliness of the people, it is difficult to imagine that thirty years ago one would have been in more danger travelling through here than through China.  Passing through the main streets of Ushidzu in search of the best yadoya, I am accosted by a middle-aged woman with, “Hello! you wanchee room? wanchee chow-chow.”  Her mother keeps a yadoya, she tells me, and leads the way thither, chatting gayly in pidgeon English, all the way.  She seems very pleased at the opportunity to exercise her little stock of broken English, and tells me she learned it at Shanghai, where she once resided for a couple of years in an English family.  Her name, she says, is O-hanna, but her English friends used to call her Hannah, without the prefix.  Understanding from experience what I would be most likely to appreciate for supper, she rustles around and prepares a nice fish, plenty of Ureshino tea, sugar, sweet-cakes, and sliced pomolo; this, together with rice, is the extent of Ushidzu’s present gastronomic limits.

The following morning opens with a white frost, the road is level and good, and the yadoya people see that I am provided with a substantial breakfast in good season.  My boots, I find, have been cleaned even.  They were cleaned with a rag, O-hanna apologizing for the absence of shoe-brushes and blacking in pidgeon English:  “Brush no have got.”

In striking contrast to China, here are gangs of “cantonniers” taking care of the road; men in regular blue uniforms with big white “bull’s-eyes,” and characters like our Celestial friends the yameni-runners.  Troops of school-children are passed on the road going to school with books and tally-boards under their arm.  They sometimes range themselves in rows alongside the road, and, as I wheel past, bob their heads simultaneously down to the level of their knees and greet me with a polite “O-ai-o.”