sound is audible, and I hear low rumbling of mingled voices, and
above all the sharp Hai, Hai of the tea-house girls in full chorus
from every quarter of the house. The habit of saying it is so
strong that a man roused out of sleep jumps up with Hai, Hai, and
often, when I speak to Ito in English, a stupid Hebe sitting by
answers Hai.

I don't want to convey a false impression of the noise here. It
would be at least three times as great were I in equally close
proximity to a large hotel kitchen in England, with fifty Britons
only separated from me by paper partitions. I had not been long in
bed on Saturday night when I was awoke by Ito bringing in an old
hen which he said he could stew till it was tender, and I fell
asleep again with its dying squeak in my ears, to be awoke a second
time by two policemen wanting for some occult reason to see my
passport, and a third time by two men with lanterns scrambling and
fumbling about the room for the strings of a mosquito net, which
they wanted for another traveller. These are among the ludicrous
incidents of Japanese travelling. About five Ito woke me by saying
he was quite sure that the moxa would be the thing to cure my
spine, and, as we were going to stay all day, he would go and fetch
an operator; but I rejected this as emphatically as the services of
the blind man! Yesterday a man came and pasted slips of paper over
all the "peep holes" in the shoji, and I have been very little
annoyed, even though the yadoya is so crowded.

The rain continues to come down in torrents, and rumours are hourly
arriving of disasters to roads and bridges on the northern route.
I. L. B.