The people of the village, like a large proportion of the population of the prefecture, are distinctly progressive.  Nagano is full of what someone called “a new rural type” of men who read and delight in going to lectures.  Lectures are a great institution in Nagano.  For these lectures country people tramp into a county town in their waraji carrying their bento.  To these rustics a lecture is a lecture.  A friend of mine who is given to lecturing spoke on one occasion for seven hours.  It is true that he divided the lecture between two days and allowed himself a half hour’s rest in the middle of each three and a half hours’ section.  He started with an audience of 500.  On the first day at the end of the second part of the lecture it was noticed that the audience had decreased by about 70.  On the second day about 100 people in all wearied in well-doing.  But it was the townsfolk, not the country people, who left.

[Illustration:  A CRADLE]

I found upon enquiry that in the village in which I had been living there had been one arrest only during the previous year.  The charge was one of theft.  Half a dozen other people had got into trouble but their arrests had been “postponed.”  Two of these six delinquents had “caused fire accidentally,” two had been guilty of petty theft, and the remaining two had sold things of small value which did not belong to them.  During the twelve months there had been no charges of immorality and no gambling.  Perhaps, however, there may have been police admonitions.  It seemed to have been a long time since there had been a case of what we should call illegitimacy or of a child being born in the first months of a young couple’s marriage.  Someone mentioned, however, that the girls who went to the silk factories were, as a consequence of their life there, “debased morally and physically.”

A notable thing in the village was four fires, two the month before we arrived and two while we were there.  They were suspected to have been the work of a person of weak intellect. (As in our own villages half a century ago, there is in every community at least one “natural.”) On the night of the first fire we were awakened about 3 a.m. by shouting, by the clanging of the fire bell and by the booming of the great bell in the temple yard.  The fire was about four houses away.  It was a still night and the flames and sparks went straight up.  As the possibility of the wind shifting and the fire spreading could not be entirely excluded we quickly got our more important possessions on the engawa—­at least a young maidservant did so.  The continual experience which the Japanese have of fires makes them self-possessed on these occasions, and this girl had futon, bags, etc., neatly tied in big furoshiki (wrapping cloths) in the shortest possible time.  It was only when she was satisfied that our belongings were in readiness for easy removal that she went to look after her own.  The matter-of-fact, fore-sighted, neat way in which she got to work was admirable.  With great kindness one of the elders of the village came hurriedly to the temple, evidently thinking we should feel alarmed, and cried out, “Yoroshii, Yoroshii” ("All right").