The weather opens clear and frosty after the rain, and the road to Fukuoko is most excellent wheeling; the country continues charming, and every day the people seem to get more and more polite and agreeable.  A novel sight of the morning’s ride is a big gang of convicts working the roads.  They are fastened together with light chains, wear neat brown uniforms, and seem to regard the unconvicted world of humans outside their own company with an expression of apology.  To look in their serio-comic faces it is difficult to imagine them capable of doing anything wrong, except in fun:  they look, in fact, as if their being chained together and closely attended by guards was of itself anything but a serious affair.

Cavalry officers, small, smart-looking, and soldierly, in yellow-braided uniforms, are seen in Fukuoko, looking as un-Asiatic in make-up as the schools, policemen, and telegraph-operators.  A collision with a jinrikisha that treats me to a header, and another with a diminutive Jap, that bowls him over like a ninepin, and a third with a bobtailed cat, that damages nothing but pussy’s dignity, enter into my reminiscences of Fukuoko.  The numbers of jinrikishas, and the peculiar habits of the people, necessitate lynx-eyed vigilance to prevent collisions every hour of the day.  The average Jap leaves the door of a house backward, and bows and scrapes his way clear out into the middle of the street, in bidding adieu to the friends he has been calling upon, or even the shopkeeper he has been patronizing.  Scarcely a village is passed through but some person waltzes backward out of a door and right in front of the bicycle.

A curious sight one frequently sees along the road is an acre or two of ground covered with paper parasols, set out in the sun to dry after being pasted, glued, and painted ready for market.  Umbrellas and paper lanterns are as much a part of the Japanese traveller’s outfit as his clothes.  These latter, nowadays, are sometimes a very grotesque mixture of native and European costume.  The craze for foreign innovations pervades all ranks of society, and every village dandy aspires to some article of European clothing.  The result is that one frequently encounters men on the road wearing a Derby hat, a red blanket, tight-fitting white drawers, and straw sandals.  The villager who sports a European hat or coat comes around to my yadoya, wearing an amusing expression of self-satisfaction, as though filled with an inward consciousness of inv approval of the same.  Whereas, every European traveller deprecates the change from their native costume to our own.