see.  The garden, instead of being shut in by a wall with a tiled coping or by a palisade of bamboo stems in the ordinary way, was open towards the rice fields, a scene of restful beauty.  As our kuruma drew near the house, the steward appeared, a broom in his hand.  Running for a short distance before us until we entered the courtyard, he symbolically swept the ground according to old custom.  After a delightful hot bath and an elaborate supper, which my fellow traveller afterwards assured me had meant a week’s work for the women of the household—­snapping turtle and choice bamboo shoots were among the honourable dishes—­we gathered at the open side of the room overlooking the garden.  Fireflies glowed in the paddies and in the garden two stone lanterns had been lighted.  One of them, which had a crescent-shaped opening cut in it, gleamed like the moon; the other, which had a small serrated opening, represented a star.

I paid a visit to the local agricultural co-operative store which did business under the motto, “Faith is the Mother of all Virtue.”  More than half the money taken at the store was for artificial manures.  Next came purchases of imported rice, for, like the Danish peasants who export their butter and eat margarine, the local peasants sold their own rice and bought the Saigon variety.  The society sold in a year a considerable quantity of sake.  Stretched over the doorway of the building in which the goods of the society were stored were the rope and paper streamers which are seen before Shinto shrines and consecrated places.  The society had a large flag post for weather signals, a white flag for a fine day, a red one for cloudy weather and a blue one for rain.

I brought away from this village a calendar of agricultural operations with poems or mottoes for each month, in the collection of which I suspect the poet had a hand: 

January:  Future of the day determined in the morning.

February:  The voice of one reading a farming book coming
  from the snow-covered window.

March:  Grafting these young trees, thinking of the days
  of my grandchildren.

April:  Digging the soil of the paddy field, sincerity
  concentrated on the edge of the mattock.

May:  Returning home with the dim moonlight glinting
  on the edges of our mattocks.

June:  Boundless wealth stored up by gracious heaven: 
  dig it out with your mattock, take it away with your
  sickle.

July:  Weeding the paddy field[132] in a happiness and
  contentment which townspeople do not know.

August:  Standing peasant worthier than resting rich man.

September:  Ears of rice bend their heads as they ripen. 
  (An allusion to wisdom and meekness.)

October:  White steam coming out of a manure house on an autumn morning.

November:  Moon clear and bright above neatly divided
  paddy fields.