The farmers were now preparing their lands for rice. The fields, by means of a raised border, lay almost entirely under water. This was the case even with those sides of the hills intended for rice. They were laid out in terraces, the water collected on the higher grounds being regulated by means of walls or dams, so as to be let on or shut off at pleasure. There were, also, reservoirs, constructed to retain the contents of the flooded streams, against occasions of drought. The rice was sown first very close and thick, and when about six inches high was transplanted into the fields, in tufts of several plants, placed about six inches apart. This was done by the women, who waded about in water at least six inches deep, the men having first turned up the ground with a hoe. Beautiful white herons followed the laborers, and cleared the fields of worms. The rice thus planted was reaped in November. [Illustration: KWANNON, GODDESS OF MERCY] Fields of wheat, barley (used to feed the horses), buckwheat, East India kale (_Brassica orientalis_), and mustard (the two latter for oil) were also seen. These crops, planted in November or December, and ripe in May or June, were in beds about a foot broad, and separated from each other by a deep furrow or trench of about the same breadth. Sometimes they were planted across these narrow beds, and sometimes in two rows, lengthwise. Thunberg noticed that when the ear was about to put forth, the plants being grown to the height of a foot, the earth was taken out from the intervening trenches, and drawn up to the roots of the plants. About the same time, or a little earlier, the liquid manure collected in the jars already described, and mingled with all sorts of refuse, was carried out by the farmers, in large pails, and poured with a ladle on the roots of the plants; a method which avoids the waste incident to spreading the manure on unplanted fields, to be dried up by the sun, or to lose by evaporation its volatile salts and oily particles.