narrowest valleys, often steeply sloping, and into which jutting spurs create the greatest irregularity of boundary and slope. The journey of this day covered 350 miles in fourteen hours, all of the way through a country of remarkable and peculiar beauty which can be duplicated nowhere outside the mountainous, rice-growing Orient and there only during fifteen days closing the transplanting season. There were neither high mountains nor broad valleys, no great rivers and but few lakes; neither rugged naked rocks, tall forest trees nor wide level fields reaching away to unbroken horizons. But the low, rounded, soil-mantled mountain tops clothed in herbaceous and young forest growth fell everywhere into lower hills and these into narrow steep valleys which dropped by a series of water-level benches, as seen in Fig. 225, to the main river courses. Each one of these millions of terraces, set about by its raised rim, was a silvery sheet of water dotted in the daintiest manner with bunches of rice just transplanted, but not so close nor yet so high and over-spreading as to obscure the water, yet quite enough to impart to the surface a most delicate sheen of green; and the grass-grown narrow rims retaining the water in the basins, cemented them into series of the most superb mosaics, shaped into the valley bottoms by artizan artists perhaps two thousand years before and maintained by their descendants through all the years since, that on them the rains and fertility from the mountains and the sunshine from heaven might be transformed by the rice plant into food for the families and support for the nation. Two weeks earlier the aspect of these landscapes was very different, and two weeks later the reflecting water would lie hidden beneath the growing and rapidly developing mantle of green, to go on changing until autumn, when all would be overspread with the ripened harvest of grain. And what intensified the beauty of it all was the fact that only along the widest valley bottoms were the mosaics level, except the water surface of each individual unit and these were always small. At one time we were riding along a descending series of steps and then along another rising through a winding valley to disappear around a projecting spur, and anywhere in the midst of it all might be standing Japanese cottages or villas with the water and the growing rice literally almost against the walls, as seen in Fig. 226, while a near-by high terrace might hold its water on a level with the chimney-tops. Can one wonder that the Japanese loves his country or that they are born and bred landscape artists?