The country hereabout is rich and populous, and the people seemingly well-to-do.  The tea-houses, farm-houses, and even the little ricks of rice seem built with an eye to artistic effect.  One sees here the gradual encroachment of Western mechanical improvements.  The first two-handled plough I have seen since leaving Europe is encountered this morning; but alongside it are men using the clumsy Japanese digging-tool of their ancestors, and both men and women stripped to the waist, hulling rice by pounding it in mortars with long-headed pestles.  It is merely a question of a few years, however, until the intelligent Japs will discard all their old clumsy methods and introduce the latest agricultural improvements of the West into their country.  Passing through a mile or more of Saga’s smooth and continuously ridable streets, past big school-houses where hundreds of children are reciting aloud in chorus, past the big bronze Buddha for which Saga is locally famous, the road continues through a somewhat undulating country, ridable, generally speaking, the whole way.  Long cedar or cryptomerian avenues sometimes characterize the way.  Strings of peasants are encountered, leading pack-ponies and bullocks.  The former seem to be vicious little wretches, rather masters, on the whole, than servants of their leaders.

The Japanese horse objects to a tight girth, objects to being overloaded, and to various other indignities that his relations of other countries meekly endure.  To suit his fastidious requirements he is allowed to meander carelessly along at the end of a twenty-foot string, and he is decorated all over with gay and fanciful trappings.  A very peculiar trait of his character is that of showing fight at anything he doesn’t like the looks of, instead of scaring at it after the orthodox method of horse-flesh in other countries.  This peculiarity sometimes makes it extremely interesting for myself.  Their usual manner of taking exception to me and the bicycle is to rear up on the hind feet and squeal and paw the air, at the same time evincing a disposition to come on and chew me up.  This necessitates continual wariness on my part when passing a company of peasants, for the men never seem to think it worth while to restrain their horses until the actions of the latter render it absolutely necessary.

Jinrikishas now become quite frequent, pulled by sturdy-limbed men, who, naked almost as the day they were born, trot along between the shafts of their two-wheeled vehicles at the rate of six miles an hour.  Men also are met pulling heavy hand-carts, loaded with tiles, from country factories to the city.  Most of the heaviest labor seems to be performed by human beings, though not to the same extent as in China.