I Feebly Said I Would Have It Boiled For
Breakfast, But When Ito Called Me This Morning He Told Me With A
Most Rueful Face That Just As He Was Going To Kill It It Had
Escaped To The Woods!
In order to understand my feelings you must
have experienced what it is not to have tasted fish, flesh, or
fowl, for ten days!
The alternative was eggs and some of the paste
which the man was treading yesterday on the mat cut into strips and
boiled! It was coarse flour and buckwheat, so, you see, I have
learned not to be particular!
I. L. B.
LETTER XIV
An Infamous Road - Monotonous Greenery - Abysmal Dirt - Low Lives - The
Tsugawa Yadoya - Politeness - A Shipping Port - A Barbarian Devil.
TSUGAWA, July 2.
Yesterday's journey was one of the most severe I have yet had, for
in ten hours of hard travelling I only accomplished fifteen miles.
The road from Kurumatoge westwards is so infamous that the stages
are sometimes little more than a mile. Yet it is by it, so far at
least as the Tsugawa river, that the produce and manufactures of
the rich plain of Aidzu, with its numerous towns, and of a very
large interior district, must find an outlet at Niigata. In
defiance of all modern ideas, it goes straight up and straight down
hill, at a gradient that I should be afraid to hazard a guess at,
and at present it is a perfect quagmire, into which great stones
have been thrown, some of which have subsided edgewise, and others
have disappeared altogether.
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