Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/161

Rh pretty, hilly country, cultivated minutely in terraces to the summits of the hills. Large numbers of memorial arches spanned the way, erected by an admiring posterity, and with the gracious consent of a paternal emperor, to the memory of those virtuous and constant widows who had preferred to spend life single after the decease of their husbands, to taking a second ticket in the matrimonial lottery.

For the whole of the day our paved way wound among rounded hills dotted here and there with bamboos, cypresses, mulberries, banyans, and other evergreens. In the lower parts the land presented a patchwork of terraced enclosures under water, while on the hillsides were growing indigo, tobacco, wheat (a winter crop here), beans, turnips, and poppy quite recently sown. The quantity and variety of vegetables to be seen growing all over the country is, indeed, astonishing; the people themselves are enormously fond of a vegetable diet, and "indulge fearlessly in almost everything green, from clover to the young spring shoots of trees."