In This City People
In Wadded Clothes, With Only Their Eyes Exposed, Creep About Under
The Verandahs.
The population huddles round hibachis and shivers,
for the mercury, which rises to 92 degrees in summer, falls to 15
degrees in winter.
And all this is in latitude 37 degrees 55' -
three degrees south of Naples! I. L. B.
LETTER XVII
The Canal-side at Niigata - Awful Loneliness - Courtesy - Dr. Palm's
Tandem - A Noisy Matsuri - A Jolting Journey - The Mountain Villages -
Winter Dismalness - An Out-of-the-world Hamlet - Crowded Dwellings -
Riding a Cow - "Drunk and Disorderly" - An Enforced Rest - Local
Discouragements - Heavy Loads - Absence of Beggary - Slow Travelling.
ICHINONO, July 12.
Two foreign ladies, two fair-haired foreign infants, a long-haired
foreign dog, and a foreign gentleman, who, without these
accompaniments, might have escaped notice, attracted a large but
kindly crowd to the canal side when I left Niigata. The natives
bore away the children on their shoulders, the Fysons walked to the
extremity of the canal to bid me good-bye, the sampan shot out upon
the broad, swirling flood of the Shinano, and an awful sense of
loneliness fell upon me. We crossed the Shinano, poled up the
narrow, embanked Shinkawa, had a desperate struggle with the
flooded Aganokawa, were much impeded by strings of nauseous manure-
boats on the narrow, discoloured Kajikawa, wondered at the
interminable melon and cucumber fields, and at the odd river life,
and, after hard poling for six hours, reached Kisaki, having
accomplished exactly ten miles. Then three kurumas with trotting
runners took us twenty miles at the low rate of 4.5 sen per ri. In
one place a board closed the road, but, on representing to the
chief man of the village that the traveller was a foreigner, he
courteously allowed me to pass, the Express Agent having
accompanied me thus far to see that I "got through all right." The
road was tolerably populous throughout the day's journey, and the
farming villages which extended much of the way - Tsuiji,
Kasayanage, Mono, and Mari - were neat, and many of the farms had
bamboo fences to screen them from the road. It was, on the whole,
a pleasant country, and the people, though little clothed, did not
look either poor or very dirty. The soil was very light and sandy.
There were, in fact, "pine barrens," sandy ridges with nothing on
them but spindly Scotch firs and fir scrub; but the sandy levels
between them, being heavily manured and cultivated like gardens,
bore splendid crops of cucumbers trained like peas, melons,
vegetable marrow, Arum esculentum, sweet potatoes, maize, tea,
tiger-lilies, beans, and onions; and extensive orchards with apples
and pears trained laterally on trellis-work eight feet high, were a
novelty in the landscape.
Though we were all day drawing nearer to mountains wooded to their
summits on the east, the amount of vegetation was not burdensome,
the rice swamps were few, and the air felt drier and less relaxing.
As my runners were trotting merrily over one of the pine barrens, I
met Dr. Palm returning from one of his medico-religious
expeditions, with a tandem of two naked coolies, who were going
over the ground at a great pace, and I wished that some of the most
staid directors of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society could
have the shock of seeing him!
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