Huida! With Children Whose Heads Were Shaved In Hideous
Patterns; And Now And Then, As If To Point A Moral
Lesson in the
midst of the whirling diorama, a funeral passed through the throng,
with a priest in rich robes,
Mumbling prayers, a covered barrel
containing the corpse, and a train of mourners in blue dresses with
white wings. Then we came to the fringe of Yedo, where the houses
cease to be continuous, but all that day there was little interval
between them. All had open fronts, so that the occupations of the
inmates, the "domestic life" in fact, were perfectly visible. Many
of these houses were roadside chayas, or tea-houses, and nearly all
sold sweet-meats, dried fish, pickles, mochi, or uncooked cakes of
rice dough, dried persimmons, rain hats, or straw shoes for man or
beast. The road, though wide enough for two carriages (of which we
saw none), was not good, and the ditches on both sides were
frequently neither clean nor sweet. Must I write it? The houses
were mean, poor, shabby, often even squalid, the smells were bad,
and the people looked ugly, shabby, and poor, though all were
working at something or other.
The country is a dead level, and mainly an artificial mud flat or
swamp, in whose fertile ooze various aquatic birds were wading, and
in which hundreds of men and women were wading too, above their
knees in slush; for this plain of Yedo is mainly a great rice-
field, and this is the busy season of rice-planting; for here, in
the sense in which we understand it, they do not "cast their bread
upon the waters." There are eight or nine leading varieties of
rice grown in Japan, all of which, except an upland species,
require mud, water, and much puddling and nasty work.
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