Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/219

 a colossal statue of the deity stands high against the sky. For more than a century this bronze goddess of Mercy has been the object of pious pilgrimages, the pilgrims clapping their hands and bowing in prayer to all the thirty-three Kwannons cut in the face of the solid rock-base on which our lady of pity stands.

We reached the long, dull town of Toyohashi at dusk, to find the large tea-house crowded with travellers. Two rooms looking out upon a sultry high-walled garden were given us, and for dining-room a tiny alcove of a place on one of the middle courts. This room was so small and close that we had to leave the screens open, though the corridor led to the large bath-room, where half a dozen people splashed and chattered noisily and gentlemen with their clothes on their arms went back and forth before our door as if before the life class of an art school. The noise of the bathers was kept up gayly, until long after midnight, and no one in the tea-house seemed to be sleeping. By four o’clock in the morning such a coughing, blowing, and sputtering began in the court beside my room that I finally slid the screens and looked out. At least a dozen lodgers were brushing their teeth in the picturesque little quadrangle of rocks, bamboos, and palms, and bathing face and hands in the large stone and bronze urns that we had supposed to be ornamental only. Later, the gravel was covered with scores of the wooden sticks of tooth-brushes, beaten out into a tassel of fibres at one end, and with many boxes emptied of the coarse, gritty tooth-powder which the Japanese use so freely.

The last day of our long jinrikisha ride was warm, the sun glared on a white, dusty road, and the country was flat and uninteresting. Each little town and village seemed duller than the other. Wheat and rape were being harvested and spread to dry, and in the farm-yards men and women were hatchelling, beating out the grain 203