Sorrowfully we turned our backs on the snow-clad crater of Fujiyama and harried on our way. The great Tokaido rond was 8 cyclist's joy, and the pace was brisk, We stopped xt little wayside inns and feasted on dried persimmons, and the people, just as though they had stepped out of @ screen or off a fan, greeted us with cries of Ohayo gozrinas (Your honourable arrival is welcome"). Everything was honourable. Ten was o-cha (honourable tea"), Soup they called o-tsun ("honourable refreshing dew"), When we said we were hungry they ex-prosed solicitude for our honourable stomachs." They are very polite, are these ¢ entry, aesthetic Japanese. It is said they don't know how to swear. But that will come time, when they are more civilised.
Village after village we ran through. And very, very eccentric toy places some of them looked, with little buys, shaven-crowned, flying kites representing all sorts of fearsome monsters and dragons, and little girls, spic and span, like little dollies in their gaudy, blue and red robes, with and old women twirling the spindle, am large-eyed babies strapped on their backs,
old men smoking. The plants in the gardens were the very burlesques of horticultare. Everything was dwarfed and unusual. The roofs of the houses wore of mellowed thatch, and on many ridges were pots of lilies, There is an old woman's tale that ones upon a time face-powder was made from lily roots. The king, bent stopping the vanity, decreed that. lilies should no longer grow on the surface of the earth, But where there's a will there's a way with Japanese women. They dug up the lilies, and ever since then they hare grown them on the roof.
A big, awkward, unwheelable range of hills, called the Hakone Mountains, stood right in our way. We had the idea of ing them, going out of our way, in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.