Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/362

 road now in some wild ravine, and again running up some emerald rice valley. All the way we met primitive ox-carts carrying their loads down to Kobé, each driver bearing an equally heavy load hanging from the ends of a pole across his shoulders. The oxen’s horns were bound with fantastic bits of red cloth, their feet shod with straw sandals; and the cart was braked on the slopes by the main force and strength of the driver exerted against a long tongue or pole that also served to guide it. These placid, easy-going oxen, with their hard-working drivers walking beside them, afford some of the best pictures of the old road-side scenes. Small boys trudged at their fathers’ heels with bundles of baskets or firewood over their shoulders, and women carried their share of the family load.

When the bamboo groves and rice fields of Arima’s neighborhood appeared, the paddy fields, lying terrace below terrace on a rounding hill-side in waving, irregular lines, easily suggested the terraced basins around the Yellowstone hot springs; the Japanese farmer unconsciously repeating, in larger outlines of vivid green, what the overflowing waters have built up in snowy deposits in the Montana Park. Arima, which lines the sides of a steep gorge through which a wild mountain-stream dashes, is as picturesque as a mountain village in Switzerland. The houses are built almost one on top of another, with narrow, winding streets, where the heavy projecting roofs almost meet. Stone steps ease the steep slopes for the villagers, and the clatter of clogs and the sight of the peasants going up and down the stair-ways, half-hidden by the loads of grass or straw on their backs, recall similar pictures in the crooked little mountain hamlets of Northern Italy. At the tea-house we wandered through an intricate garden before reaching the steps of the detached pavilion, on whose balcony were chairs and hammocks, and before which loomed a 346