I looked into a school and saw the wall inscription, “Penmanship is like pulling a cart uphill.  There must be no haste and no stopping.”  Here, as in so many places, I saw the well-worn cover and much-thumbed pages of Self Help.  I may add a fact which would be in its place in a new edition of Smiles’s Character.  As a simple opening to conversation I often asked if a man had been in Europe or America.  His answer, if he had not travelled, was never “No.”  It was always “Not yet.”

In these country schools most of the songs are set to Western tunes.  Such airs as “Ye Banks and Braes,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Annie Laurie,” “Home, Sweet Home” and “The Last Rose of Summer” are utilised for the songs not only of school children but of university students.  Few of the singers have any notion that the music was not written in their own land.  A Japanese friend told me that all the airs I mentioned “seem tender and touching to us,” and I remember a Japanese agricultural expert saying, “Reading those poems of Burns, I believe firmly that our hearts can vibrate with yours.”

As I have denied myself the pleasure of dwelling on Japanese scenic beauties, I may not pause to bear witness to the faery delights of cherry blossom which I enjoyed everywhere during this journey.  But I may record two cherry-blossom poems I gathered by the way.  The first is, “Why do you wear such a long sword, you who have come only to see the cherry blossoms?” The second is, “Why fasten your horse to the cherry tree which is in full bloom, when the petals would fall off if the horse reared?” A Japanese once told me that a foreigner had greatly surprised him by asking if the cherry trees bore much fruit.

Orange as well as tea culture is a feature of the agricultural life of the prefecture.  As in California and South Africa, ladybirds have been reared in large numbers in order to destroy scale.  I saw at the experiment station miserable orange trees encaged for producing scale for the breeding ladybirds.  The insects are distributed from the station chiefly as larvae.  They are sent through the post about a hundred at a time in boxes.  The ladybird, which has, I believe, eight generations a year, and as an adult lives some twenty days, lays from 200 to 250 eggs, 150 of the larvae from which may survive.  Alas for the released ladybirds of Shidzuoka!  Scale is said to be disappearing so quickly that they are having but a hard life of it.

In the neighbouring prefecture of Kanagawa I paid a visit to a gentleman who, with his brother, had devoted himself extensively to fruit and flower growing.  Their produce was sent the twenty-six hours’ journey by road to Tokyo, where four shops were maintained.  A considerable quantity of foreign pears had been produced on the palmette verrier system.  The branches of the extensively grown native pear are everywhere tied to an overhead framework which completely covers in the land on which the trees stand.  This