ght to be
nurses not only physically but morally." The boys and girls of the
village are invited to the temple once a month and "told a story." The
youngsters are asked to come to a "learning meeting" where they must
recite or exhibit something they have written or drawn; "blockheads as
well as clever children are encouraged." A fund is being raised so
that "a genius who may be suffering from poverty may be able to get
proper education." Then there is a Women's Religious Association which
aims at "the improvement, necessary from a religious point of view, in
the home and of agricultural business." Sermons are given to 500 women
monthly. The society sent comfort bags, containing letters,
tooth-brushes and sweets, to soldiers at the taking of Tsingtao. A
similar organisation for men had for thirteen years listened to a
monthly lecture by a well-known priest. It sends occasional
subscriptions outside the village. Finally, this praiseworthy temple
issues every month 20,000 copies of a 4-1/2-sen magazine.

The Shinto shrines of the prefecture have in all a little more than 40
_cho_ of land. Someone has hit on the plan of getting the
agricultural societies of the county and villages to provide the
priests with rice seed of superior varieties, the crop of which can be
exchanged with farmers for common rice. This is done on a profitable
basis, because the shrines exchange unpolished rice for polished. A
_go_ of seed rice makes only about .5 _go_ when husked.

I walked along the road some little way with a Buddhist priest. In
answer to my enquiry he said that as a Buddhist he felt no difficulty
about the bag strung across his shoulders being of leather, for the
founder of his sect (Shinshu) ate meat. Even a strict Buddhist might
nowadays eat animals not intentionally killed, animals which had not
been seen alive and animals which were killed painlessly. But my
companion abstained as much as possible from meat. As to the reason
why some priests were inactive in the work of rural amelioration, he
supposed that their poverty, the tradition of devoting themselves to
unworldly business and the fact that many of them were hereditary
priests accounted for it. He dwelt on the things in common between
Shinshu and Christianity and said that, next to the teaching of the
head of the agricultural college in the prefecture, the preaching of a
missionary had led him to work for the good of his village.

In my host's house in the evening som