work, though done slowly and with due attention to the comfort
of the worker, is well done, and certainly accomplished as rapidly as
any one could expect of laborers who earn only from eight to twelve
cents a day. Another employment for this same class of laborers is the
picking of moss and grass from the crevices of the great walls that
inclose the moats and embankments of the capital. Mounted on little
ladders, they pick and scrape with knives until the wall is clear and
fresh, with no insidious growth to push the great uncemented stones out
of their places.

In contrast with these humble but cheerful toilers may be mentioned
another class of women, often met with in the great cities. Dressed in
rags and with covered heads and faces, they wander about the streets
playing the _samisen_ outside the latticed windows, and singing with
cracked voices some wailing melody. As they go from house to house,
gaining a miserable pittance by their weird music, they seem the
embodiment of all that is hopeless and broken-hearted. What they are or
whence they come, I know not, but they always remind me of the
grasshopper in the fable, who danced and sang through the brief summer,
to come, wailing and wretched, seeking aid from her thriftier neighbor
when at last the winter closed in upon her.

As one rides about the streets, one often sees a little, white-haired
old woman trotting about with a yoke over her shoulders from which are
suspended two swinging baskets, filled with fresh vegetables. The fact
that her hair is still growing to its natural length shows that she is
still a wife and not a widow; her worn and patched blue cotton clothes,
bleached light from much washing, show that extreme poverty is her lot
in life; and as she hobbles along with the gait peculiar to those who
carry a yoke, my thoughts are busy with her home, which, though poor and
small, is doubtless clean and comfortable, but my eye follows her
through the city's crowd, where laborer, soldier, student, and high
official jostle each other by the way. Suddenly I see her pause before
the gateway of a temple. She sets her burden down, and there in the
midst of the bustling throng, with bowed head, folded hands, and moving
lips, she invokes her god, snatching this moment from her busy life to
seek a blessing for herself and her dear ones. The throng moves busily
on, making a little eddy around the burden she has laid down, but paying
no heed to the devout little fi