Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/185

 crust of earth at the end of the lake, and boiling sulphur wells up, even in the bed of the lake itself, and clouds and heats the whole body of water so that no fish can live there. The two miles of winding forest-path, between the fall at one end of Yumoto Lake and the village of the same name at the opposite end, lead through an enchanted forest—a picturesque tangle of roots and rocks, covered with green moss, wound with vines, shaded with ferns, and overhung with evergreen branches.

Yumoto has two streets and a dozen tea-houses, whose galleries are hung with red lanterns, as if in perpetual fête, and an atmosphere nearly all sulphuretted hydrogen. One of the hot springs bubbles up at the entrance of the village, filling a tank about ten feet square, covered by a roof resting on four corner pillars. The sides are all open to the air, and an Arcadian simplicity of bathing arrangements prevails. Citizens and sojourners stroll hither, because the site commands a view of the thoroughfare, remove and fold up their garments, and sit down in the pool. When sufficiently boiled, they cool off occasionally on the edge of the tank, and then drop into the pool again. If the company prove agreeable, the bath occupies hours. More open-air pavilions are at the end of the village, where more bronze figures boil and cool themselves in the same exoteric fashion. The public bath-houses, that alternate with the tea-houses in the village streets, have roofs and sides of solid wood, except the street front, which is open and curtainless, and within which men, women, and children meet in the hot-water tanks, as at the market-place or street-corners in other countries. To a new-comer this extraordinary simplicity is startling, but it he stays long enough, he finds that the childlike innocence and unconcern of the people make a new code of the proprieties.

These infantile views of the Japanese as to bathing make even the great pay little attention to the seclusion 169