Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/342

 in the mud and water, stirring the muck around the young shoots, and tearing up the water-weeds with iron hooks. No other grain requires as much care as rice, and from the first transplanting from the seed-bed until the ears of grain are formed, there is continuous grubbing in the mire of the paddy fields. The legions of frogs that live in them share their abode with horrible slugs, snails, blood-suckers, and stingers of many kinds, against whose assaults the poor farmers wrap their legs knee-high with many thicknesses of cotton cloth. Following the level plain and skirting instead of surmounting the bold mountain-spur, all the twenty-six miles from Nara to Osaka ran through rice fields. Every little square of dyked paddy-field had its workers. In some the first ploughing was being done; in others the water was being worked into the soil; and, farther on, men and women, standing ankle-deep in the muck, were setting out the tiny green shoots. Here and there laborers were treading water-wheels to pump water from the lower to the higher levels, or with long sweeps dipping it slowly up from wells.

There are seven great Buddhist monasteries around Nara, all more or less in decay, but all possessing relics of great historic interest and value. Several of them show their white walls, like fortresses, high on the mountain-side, and in them linger the remnants of a once rich and numerous priesthood—their sacred retreats being so remote and inaccessible that not half a dozen foreigners have ever visited them.

Horiuji, half-way to Osaka, is the largest of these Nara monasteries, and its pagoda and Hondo are the oldest wooden buildings in Japan. Both were completed in the year 607, and both are intact, solid, and firm enough to endure for twelve centuries more. To students of Buddhism, Horiuji is a Mecca, on account of its wealth of scriptures, statues, pictures, and relics, 326