Artificial lakes, islands, waterfalls, bridges, temples, and groves abound; and at occasional intervals a large figure of the Buddha squats serenely on a pedestal, smiling in happy contemplation of the peace, happiness, prosperity, and beauty of everything and everybody around.  Happy people! happy country.  Are the Japs acting wisely or are they acting foolishly in permitting European notions of life to creep in and revolutionize it all.  Who can tell.  Time alone will prove.  They will get richer, more powerful, and more enterprising, because of the necessity of waking themselves up to keep abreast of the times; but wealth and power, and the buzz and rattle of machinery and commerce do not always mean happiness.

CHAPTER XX.

The home stretch.

During the afternoon the narrow kuruma road merges into a broad, newly made macadam, as fine a piece of road as I have seen the whole world round.  Wonderful work has been done in grading it from the low-lying rice-fields, up, up, up, by the most gentle and even gradient, to where it seemingly terminates, far ahead between high rocky cliffs.  The picture of charming houses and beautiful terraced gardens climbing to the very upper stories of the mountains here beggars description; one no longer marvels at what he has seen in the way of terraced mountains in China.

New sensations of astonishment await me as the upper portion of the smooth boulevard is reached, and I find myself at the entrance to a tunnel about five hundred yards long and thirty feet wide.  The tunnel is lit up by means of big reflectors in the middle, shining through the gloom as one enters, like locomotive headlights.  It is difficult to imagine the Japs going to all this trouble and expense for mere jinrikisha and pedestrian travel; yet such is the case, for no other vehicular traffic exists in the country.  It is the only country in which I have found a tunnel constructed for the ordinary roadway, although there may be similar improvements that have not happened to come to my notice or ear.  One would at least expect to find a toll-keeper in such a place, especially as a person has to be employed to maintain the lights, but there is nothing of the kind.

A few miles beyond the tunnel the broad road terminates in a good-sized seaport, whence I encounter some little difficulty in finding my way along zigzag field-paths to my proper road for the north.  The rain has fallen at intervals throughout the day, but the roads have averaged good.  Fifty miles, or thereabout, must have been reeled off when, at early eventide, I pull up at a village ya-doya.  Before settling myself down, for rest and supper, I take a stroll through the village in quest of possible interesting things.  Not far from the yadoya my attention is arrested by a prominent sign, in italics, “uropean eating, Kameya hous.”  Entertaining happy visions of beefsteak and Bass’s ale for supper, I enter the establishment and ask the young man in charge whether the place is an hotel.  He smiles, bows, and intimates his woeful ignorance of what I am saying.