At one of the schools where we lunched I noticed that the large wall maps were of Siam and Malaya, Borneo, Australia and China (two).  The portraits were of Florence Nightingale, Lincoln, Napoleon and Christ as the Good Shepherd, the last named being “a present from a believer friend of the schoolmaster."[127] This school closed at noon from July 10 to July 31, and had twenty days’ vacation in August and another twenty days in the rice-planting and busy sericultural season.  The sewing-room of the school was used in winter as a dormitory for boys who lived at a distance.  Accommodation for girls was provided in the village.  The children brought their rice with them.  The products of the school farm were also eaten by the boarding pupils.  It was estimated that the cost of maintaining the girls was 10 sen a day.  Three-fourths of this expense was borne by the village.  The regularity and strictness of the dormitory management were found to have an excellent effect.  At the winter school, an adjunct of the day school, there was an attendance of a score of youths and sixty girls.

Speaking of a place where we stayed for the night, one who had a wide knowledge of rural Japan said that he did not think that there was a lonelier spot where farming was carried on.  There was no market or fair for 80 or 90 miles and the little groups of houses were 2 or 3 miles apart.  In this district, it was explained, “the rich are not so rich and the poor are not so poor.”

We passed somewhere a fine shrine for the welfare of horses.  At a certain festival hundreds of horses are driven down there to gallop round and round the sacred buildings.  Thousands of people attend this festival, but it was declared that no one was ever hurt by the horses.

The poetical names of country inns would make an interesting collection.  I remember that it was at “the inn of cold spring water” that the waiting-maid had never seen cow’s milk.  She proved to be the daughter of the host and wore a gold ring by way of marking the fact.  This girl told us that on the banks of the river there was only one house in 70 miles.  The village was having the usual holiday to celebrate the end of the toilsome sericultural season.

On our way to the next village we met two far-travelled young women selling the dried seaweed which, in many varieties, figures in the Japanese dietary.[128] (There are shops which sell nothing but prepared seaweeds.) A notice board there informed us that the road was maintained at the cost of the local young men’s society.  As we were on foot we felt grateful, for the road was well kept.  We passed for miles over planking hung on the cliff side or on roadway carried on embankments.  On the suspended pathways there was now and then a plank loose or broken, and there was no rail between the pedestrian and the torrent dashing below.  Where there was embanked roadway it was almost always uphill and downhill and it frequently swung sharply round the corner of a cliff.  As the river increased in volume we saw many rafts of timber shooting the rapids.  At one place twenty-six raftsmen had been drowned.  The remnants of two bridges showed the force of the floods.