[Illustration:  FIRE ALARM AND OBSERVATION POST]

As I stood before the blaze what struck me most was the orderliness and quiet of the crowd and the way in which whatever help was needed was at once forthcoming without fuss.  The fire brigades were working in an orderly way and everything was so well managed that the scene seemed almost as if it were being rehearsed for a cinema.  One difference between what I saw and what would be seen at home at a fire was that the scene was well lighted from the front, for the members of the fire brigades carried huge lanterns on high poles.  From the mass of old wet reed in the roadway I judged that the first act of the firemen had been to use their long hooks to denude the roof of the burning house of its thatch, which in the lightest wind is so dangerous to surrounding dwellings.  Nobody in the village is insured, but the neighbours seem to meet about a third of the loss caused by a fire.  It is an illustration of local values that a larger subscription than 2 yen would not be accepted from me.  In connection with this fire someone mentioned to me that incendiarism is specially prevalent in some prefectures, while in others the use of the knife is the usual means of wiping out scores.  The phrase used by a person who threatens arson is, “I will make the red worm creep into your roof.”

During the winter there is too much drinking—­“generally by poor men”—­but there is said to be less of this than formerly.  Some people stop their newspaper in the summer and resume taking it during the greater leisure of the winter.  It has been noted, among other small matters, that the local vocabulary has expanded during the past fifteen years.  During our stay the young midwife, who was going to America to join her husband, was eager to give her service in the kitchen for the chance of improving her English.  We also gave help in the evenings thrice a week to one of the school teachers who had managed to obtain a fair reading knowledge of English.  The earnestness with which these two people studied was touching.  While I was in the village the young men’s association began the issue of a magazine.  Lithographic ink was brought to me so that I might contribute in autograph as well as in translation.  The association, which receives 10 yen a year from the village, cultivates several plots of paddy and dry land.  The bigger schoolboys drilled with imitation rifles, imitation bayonets and imitation cartridges.  I felt that I should know more about the villagers if I could learn, like Synge, their topics of conversation when no stranger was present.  One day while strolling with a friend I asked him what was being said by two girls who were working among the mulberries and were hidden from us by a hedge (hedges only occur round mulberry plots).  He told me that one was enhancing to her companion the tremendous dignity of the Crown Prince by exaggerating grotesquely the size of the house he lived in, which reminded me of the servant