of this house is at present a schoolboy of twelve and the government of the family is in the hands of a “regent,” the lad’s uncle.  I saw the boy and his younger sister trot off in the morning with their satchels on their backs to the village school in democratic Japanese fashion.  Japan is a much more democratic country than the tourist imagines.  Distinctions of class are accompanied by easy relations in many important matters.

I went for a second time to the restful city of Nagoya.  It is out of the sphere of influence of Tokyo and is conservative of old ideas.  People live with less display than in the capital and perhaps pride themselves on doing so.  But if the houses of even the well-to-do are small and inconspicuous, the interiors are of satisfying quality in materials and workmanship, and the family godowns bring forth surprises.  Here as elsewhere the guest is served in treasured lacquer and porcelain. (While we are not accustomed in the West to look at the marks on our host’s table silver, it is perfect Japanese manners to admire a food bowl by examining the potter’s marks.) My host hung a rural kakemono in my room, one day a fine old study of poultry, another an equally beautiful painting of hollyhocks.

As we left the town my attention was attracted by a commemorative stone overlooking rice fields.  The inscription proclaimed the fact that at that spot the late Emperor Meiji,[34] as a lad of fifteen, on his historic first journey to Tokyo, “beheld the farmers reaping.”

The matron of a farmhouse two centuries old showed me a tub containing tiny carp which she had hatched for her carp pond, the inmates of which, as is common, came to be fed when she clapped her hands.  In the garden there was an old clay butt still used for archery.  In the farmhouse I was taken into a room in which in the old days the daimyo overlord had rested, into another room which had a secret door and into a third room where—­an electric fan was buzzing.

At a school I had to face the usual ordeal of having to “write” as best I could a motto for use as a wall picture.  Our lettering, when done with a brush, falls pitifully behind Chinese characters in decorative value, and our mottoes will not readily translate into Japanese.  I was often grateful to Henley for “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,” because with the substitution of “commander” for captain, the lines translate literally.

We left the village through arches which had been erected by the young men’s association.  At an old country house four interesting things were shown to me.  There was, first, a phial of rice seed 230 years old.  The agricultural professor who was my fellow-guest told me that he had germinated some of the grains, but they did not produce rice plants.  The second thing was a fine family shrine before which a religious ceremony had been performed twice a day by succeeding generations of the same family for 350 years.  The third object of interest