lish compartment. There was no stupid double
roof, window shade, or abortive thermantidote. It was a London and
South-Western carriage. Osaka is about eighteen miles from Kobe, and
stands at the head of the bay of Osaka. The train is allowed to go as
fast as fifteen miles an hour and to play at the stations all along the
line. You must know that the line runs between the hills and the shore,
and the drainage-fall is a great deal steeper than anything we have
between Saharunpur and Umballa. The rivers and the hill torrents come
down straight from the hills on raised beds of their own formation,
which beds again have to be bunded and spanned with girder bridges
or--here, perhaps, I may be wrong--tunnelled.

The stations are black-tiled, red-walled, and concrete-floored, and all
the plant from signal levers to goods-truck is English. The official
colour of the bridges is a yellow-brown most like unto a faded
chrysanthemum. The uniform of the ticket-collectors is a peaked forage
cap with gold lines, black frock-coat with brass buttons, very long in
the skirt, trousers with black mohair braid, and buttoned kid boots. You
cannot be rude to a man in such raiment.

But the countryside was the thing that made us open our eyes. Imagine a
land of rich black soil, very heavily manured, and worked by the spade
and hoe almost exclusively, and if you split your field (of vision) into
half-acre plots, you will get a notion of the raw material the
cultivator works on. But all I can write will give you no notion of the
wantonness of neatness visible in the fields, of the elaborate system of
irrigation, and the mathematical precision of the planting. There was no
mixing of crops, no waste of boundary in footpath, and no difference of
value in the land. The water stood everywhere within ten feet of the
surface, as the well-sweeps attested. On the slopes of the foot-hills
each drop between the levels was neatly riveted with unmortared stones,
and the edges of the watercuts were faced in like manner. The young rice
was transplanted very much as draughts are laid on the board; the tea
might have been cropped garden box; and between the lines of the mustard
the water lay in the drills as in a wooden trough, while the purple of
the beans ran up to the mustard and stopped as though cut with a rule.

On the seaboard we saw an almost continuous line of towns variegated
with factory chimneys; inland, the crazy-quilt of green, dark-green and
gold.