The talk turned to some advice which had been given to farmers to lay out “economic gardens.”  They were to plant no trees but fruit trees.  To this an old farmer of our company replied:  “If you are too economical your children will become mercenary.  Some families were too economical and cut down beautiful trees, planting instead economical ones.  Those families I have seen come to an evil end.  The man who exercises rigid economy may be a good man, but his children can know little of his real motives and must be wrongly influenced by his conduct.”  We all agreed that there was nowadays too much talk about money-making in rural Japan.  “Even I,” laughed the owner of the symbolic trees, “planted not persimmons but pines.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[14] That is, before the Revolution of half a century ago, when the Tokugawa Shogun resigned his powers to the Emperor.

[15] The Japanese bed, futon, consists of a soft mattress of cotton wool, two or three inches thick.  It is spread on the floor, which itself consists of mats of almost the same thickness, 6 ft. long by 3 ft. wide.

[16] Most of the really big men of Australia have left political life in comparatively impoverished circumstances.  Not only did Sir Henry Parkes die poor.  Sir George Reid took the High Commissionership in London; Sir Graham Berry was provided with a small annuity; Sir George Dibbs was made the manager of a State savings bank; Sir Edmund Barton was lifted to the High Court Bench.—­Times, January 11, 1921.

To the last day of his life, executions were levied in his house.—­Rosebery on Pitt.

[17] For his figures see Appendix I.

CHAPTER III

EARLY-RISING SOCIETIES AND OTHER INGENUOUS
ACTIVITIES

I should be heartily sorry if there were no signs of partiality.  On the other hand, there is, I trust, no importunate advocacy or tedious assentation.—­MORLEY

“The alarum clocks for waking us at four o’clock in the summer and five in the winter”—­it was the chairman of a village Early-Rising Society who was speaking to me—­are placed at the houses of the secretaries, and each member is in turn a secretary.  The duty of a secretary, when the alarum clock strikes, is to get up and visit the houses of all the members allotted to him and to shout for the young men until they answer.  Each member on rising walks to the house of the secretary of his division and writes his name on the record of attendances.  Then the member goes to the shrine, where we fence and wrestle for a time.  At first we thought that if we fenced and wrestled early in the morning we should be tired for our work, but we found that it was not so.