Even in the rain the view was lovely, and exactly as Japanese
pictures had led me to hope for. Only one drawback occurred to the
Professor and myself at the same time. Crops don't grow to the full
limit of the seed on heavily worked ground dotted with villages except
at a price.

"Cholera?" said I, watching a stretch of well-sweeps.

"Cholera," said the Professor. "Must be, y'know. It's all sewage
irrigation."

I felt that I was friends with the cultivators at once. These
broad-hatted, blue-clad gentlemen who tilled their fields by
hand--except when they borrowed the village buffalo to drive the share
through the rice-slough--knew what the scourge meant.

"How much do you think the Government takes in revenue from vegetable
gardens of that kind?" I demanded.

"Bosh," said he, quietly, "you aren't going to describe the land-tenure
of Japan. Look at the yellow of the mustard!"

It lay in sheets round the line. It ran up the hills to the dark pines.
It rioted over the brown sandbars of the swollen rivers, and faded away
by mile after mile to the shores of the leaden sea. The high-peaked
houses of brown thatch stood knee-deep in it, and it surged up to the
factory chimneys of Osaka.

"Great place, Osaka," said the guide. "All sorts of manufactures there."

Osaka is built into and over and among one thousand eight hundred and
ninety-four canals, rivers, dams, and watercuts. What the multitudinous
chimneys mean I cannot tell. They have something to do with rice and
cotton; but it is not good that the Japs should indulge in trade, and I
will not call Osaka a "great commercial _entrepot_." "People who live in
paper houses should never sell goods," as the proverb says.

Because of his many wants there is but one hotel for the Englishman in
Osaka, and they call it Juter's. Here the views of two civilisations
collide and the result is awful. The building is altogether Japanese;
wood and tile and sliding screen from top to bottom; but the fitments
are mixed. My room, for instance, held a _tokonoma_, made of the
polished black stem of a palm and delicate woodwork, framing a scroll
picture representing storks. But on the floor over the white mats lay a
Brussels carpet that made the indignant toes tingle. From the back
verandah one overhung the river which ran straight as an arrow between
two lines of houses. They have cabinet-makers in Japan to fit the rivers
to the towns. From my verandah I could see three bridges--one a