We passed a company of villagers working on the road for the local authority.  The labourers were chiefly old people and they were taking their task very easily.  Farther along the road men and women were working singly.  It seemed that the labourers belonged to families which, instead of paying rates, did a bit of roadmending.  The work was done when they had time to spare.

For some time we had been in a part of the country in which the ridges of the houses were of tiles.  At an earlier stage of our journey they had been either of straw or of earth with flowers or shrubs growing in it.  The shiny, red-brown tiles give place elsewhere to a slate-coloured variety.  The surface of all of these tiles is so smooth that they are unlikely to change their hard tint for years.  Meanwhile they give the villages a look of newness.  Their use is spreading rapidly.  Shiny though the tiles may be, one cannot but admire the neat way in which they interlock.  One day when I wondered about the cost involved in recovering roofs with these tiles, a woman worker who overheard me promptly said that, reckoning tiles and labour, the cost was 60 or 70 sen per 22 tiles.  In the old days tiled porticoes were forbidden to the commonalty.  They were allowed only to daimyos who also used exclusively the arm rests which every visitor to an inn may now command.  Besides arm rests I have frequently had kneeling cushions of the white brocade formerly used only for the zabuton of Buddhist priests.

In the county through which we were passing the fine water grass, called i, used for mat making, is grown on an area of about 78 cho.  It is sown in seed beds like rice and is transplanted into inferior paddies in September. (The grass is better grown in Hiroshima and Okayama.)

I saw a beautiful tree in red blossom.  The name given to it is “monkey slip,” because of the smoothness of its skin, which recalled the name of that very different ornament of suburban gardens, “monkey puzzle.”

During this journey we recovered something of the conditions of old-time travel.  There were chats by the way and conferences at the inn in the evening and in the morning concerning distances, the kind of vehicles available, the character of their drivers, the charges, the condition of the road, the probable weather and the places at which satisfactory accommodation might be had.  What was different from the old days was that at every stopping-place but one we had electric light.  Part of our journey was done in a small motor bus lighted by electricity.  Like the automobile we had hired a day or two before, it was driven—­by two young men in blue cotton tights—­at too high a speed considering the narrowness and curliness of the roads by which we crossed the passes.  The roads are kept in reasonably good condition, but they were made for hand cart and kuruma traffic.