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 from these improved facilities of communication. Government officials alone were allowed to use the horses kept at the post-stations and to demand a night's board and lodging in the houses of wealthy persons en route. Common folk had still to carry their food with them when they made journeys, and to cook it wherever they might. In recognition of that necessity, it became habitual for a man's friends to present to him a little bag containing two or three flints and steels when he contemplated a journey. In exceptionally favourable conditions the wayfarer found shelter for the night under some friendly or charitable roof, but in general he bivouacked at the foot of a tree, or, if he was a man of rank travelling with a retinue, his attendants constructed a hut for his accommodation. Death from starvation on a journey was a not infrequent occurrence. To such a fate labourers especially were exposed who had been summoned to some remote place on corvée: they perished on their way home. The humane Empresses Gemmyo and Genshō (708–723) sought to abate these evils by establishing stores of grain at intervals along the principal highways, and by requiring wealthy people in the provinces to make arrangements for selling rice to travellers. A few years subsequently, an edict, issued at the suggestion of a Buddhist priest, required that fruit-trees should be planted on both sides of the main road in the five metropolitan