Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/135

Rh jinrikisha and other vehicles are also to let; but among the poor, bed-clothes find most customers, especially in winter and spring. Though the total sum they pay for their borrowed clothes during a season may exceed their original cost, the sonryoya’s customers are too improvident to lay by in the summer to meet their winter’s needs. The sonryoya drives a profitable trade. In one poor quarter containing 350 families, seven sonryoya, possessing from forty to a hundred sets of beddings, run short of them in winter. Sometimes the poor are even with these traders who grow fat on them. They will pawn the hired clothes or borrow largely from the usurer; and when they are dunned by the latter or brought to account by the sonryoya, they instantly make themselves scarce, which is by no means a difficult trick, as their household effects can be carried in a small bundle. The public bath-houses are a great boon to the poor; and in winter, a hot bath warms them sufficiently to enable them to dispense with winter clothes, until they turn into the hired beds, especially if they are equally fortified within by a full draught of saké.