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[Here I must interrupt the story to tell you that, without having actually seen them, you cannot imagine how dark some Japanese country villages remain even in the brightest and hottest weather.  In the neighborhood of T[=o]ky[=o] itself there are many villages of this kind.  At a short distance from such a settlement you see no houses:  nothing is visible but a dense grove of evergreen trees.  The grove, which is usually composed of young cedars and bamboos, serves to shelter the village from storms, and also to supply timber for various purposes.  So closely are the trees planted that there is no room to pass between the trunks of them:  they stand straight as masts, and mingle their crests so as to form a roof that excludes the sun.  Each thatched cottage occupies a clear space in the plantation, the trees forming a fence about it, double the height of the building.  Under the trees it is always twilight, even at high noon; and the houses, morning or evening, are half in shadow.  What makes the first impression of such a village almost disquieting is, not the transparent gloom, which has a certain weird charm of its own, but the stillness.  There may be fifty or a hundred dwellings; but you see nobody; and you hear no sound but the twitter of invisible birds, the occasional crowing of cocks, and the shrilling of cicad[ae].  Even the cicad[ae], however, find these groves too dim, and sing faintly; being sun-lovers, they prefer the trees outside the village.  I forgot to say that you may sometimes hear a viewless shuttle—­chaka-ton, chaka-ton;—­but that familiar sound, in the great green silence, seems an elfish happening.  The reason of the hush is simply that the people are not at home.  All the adults, excepting some feeble elders, have gone to the neighboring fields, the women carrying their babies on their backs; and most of the children have gone to the nearest school, perhaps not less than a mile away.  Verily, in these dim hushed villages, one seems to behold the mysterious perpetuation of conditions recorded in the texts of Kwang-Tze:—­

“The ancients who had the nourishment of the world wished for nothing, and the world had enough:—­they did nothing, and all things were transformed:—­their stillness was abysmal, and the people were all composed.”]

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...  The village was very dark when It[=o] reached it; for the sun had set, and the after-glow made no twilight in the shadowing of the trees.  “Now, kind sir,” the child said, pointing to a narrow lane opening upon the main road, “I have to go this way.”  “Permit me, then, to see you home,” It[=o] responded; and he turned into the lane with her, feeling rather than seeing his way.  But the girl soon stopped before a small gate, dimly visible in the gloom,—­a gate of trelliswork, beyond which the lights of a dwelling could be seen.  “Here,” she said,