Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/156

 the example of piety, charity, magnanimity, and liberality that this company of hard-working Japanese fishermen and wreckers have set them.

Nikko mountains, one hundred miles north of Tokio, are the favorite summer resort of foreign residents and Tokio officials. The railway goes to Utsonomiya, and the remaining twenty-five miles of the journey are made in jinrikisha over the most beautiful highway, leading through an unbroken avenue of overarching trees to the village of Hachi-ishi, or Nikko.

On the very hottest day of the hottest week of August we packed our koris, the telescope baskets which constitute the Japanese trunk, and fled to the hills. Smoke and dust poured in at the car windows, the roof crackled in the sun, the green groves and luxuriant fields that we whirled through quivered with heat, and a chorus of grasshoppers and scissors-grinders deafened us at every halt. At Utsonomiya it was a felicity to sit in the upper room of a tea-house and dip our faces and hold our hands in basins of cool spring-water, held for us by the sympathetic nesans. They looked perfectly cool, fresh, and unruffled in their clean blue-and-white cotton kimonos, for the Japanese, like the creoles, appear never to feel the heat of summer, and, indeed, to be wholly indifferent to any weather. The same placid Utsonomiya babies, whose little shaved heads bobbed around helplessly in the blaze of that midsummer sun. I have seen equally serene with their bare skulls reddening, uncovered, on the frostiest winter mornings. 140