Why Should The
"Quiver" Of Poverty Be So Very Full?
One asks as one looks at the
swarms of gentle, naked, old-fashioned children, born to a heritage
of hard toil, to be, like their parents, devoured by vermin, and
pressed hard for taxes.
A horse kicked off my saddle before it was
girthed, the crowd scattered right and left, and work, which had
been suspended for two hours to stare at the foreigner, began
again.
A long ascent took us to the top of a pass 2500 feet in height, a
projecting spur not 30 feet wide, with a grand view of mountains
and ravines, and a maze of involved streams, which unite in a
vigorous torrent, whose course we followed for some hours, till it
expanded into a quiet river, lounging lazily through a rice swamp
of considerable extent. The map is blank in this region, but I
judged, as I afterwards found rightly, that at that pass we had
crossed the water-shed, and that the streams thenceforward no
longer fall into the Pacific, but into the Sea of Japan. At
Itosawa the horses produced stumbled so intolerably that I walked
the last stage, and reached Kayashima, a miserable village of
fifty-seven houses, so exhausted that I could not go farther, and
was obliged to put up with worse accommodation even than at
Fujihara, with less strength for its hardships.
The yadoya was simply awful. The daidokoro had a large wood fire
burning in a trench, filling the whole place with stinging smoke,
from which my room, which was merely screened off by some
dilapidated shoji, was not exempt.
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