overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw
several men and a considerable number of women praying by the
waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame.
The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other
times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only.
Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old
women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a
Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case
of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect."
My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for
his children's or his parents' health.

At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an
inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but
note the cluster of readers at the open fronts of bookshops.[187]

On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a _kuruma_ with wooden
wheels, and in the hills the day after we passed a man kneeling in a
_kago_, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a _basha_ we
discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver
for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first
to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential
in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless
chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth.

It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pass this way. My companion
frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people
said.

We saw an extinct volcano called "Green Field Mountain." There was not
a tree on it and it was said never to have possessed any. The whole
surface was closely cut, the patches cut at different periods showing
up in rectangular strips of varying shades. Wherever the hills were
treeless and too steep for cultivation they were carefully cut for
fodder. In cultivable places houses were standing on the minimum of
ground. More than once we had a view of a characteristic piece of
scenery, a dashing stream seen through a clump of bamboo.

When our basha stopped for the feeding of the horses, they had a tub
of mixture composed of boiled naked barley, rice chaff, chopped straw
and chopped green stuff. I noticed near the inn a doll in a tree. It
had been put there by children who believe that they can secure by so
doing a fine day for an outing. When we started again