Sometimes a small square hearth is cut in the sitting-room or some other convenient room; and in cold season a wooden frame supported by four pillars is put over the hearth and covered with a large quilt. Live charcoal is put into the hearth and the family sit around it with their knees under the quilt or lie down with their feet stretched out to the hearth. At other seasons the wooden frame is removed and a small mat of the same size as the hearth is put over it. As the hearth cannot be moved about, most people prefer a portable foot-warmer, which is usually a square wooden box with openings at the top and sides; one of the sides slides open and through it an earthen pan of live charcoal is placed inside. A quilt is laid over it as in the case of the hearth. Another, made specially for putting in bed, is of earthenware with a rounded top, which takes some time to heat. As the ordinary cut charcoal is consumed too quickly, balls of charcoal dust are used in these foot-warmers. CHAPTER V. MEALS. Rice—_Sake_—Wheat and barley—Soy sauce—_Mirin_—Rice-cooking—Soap—Pickled vegetables—Meal trays—Chopsticks—Breakfast—Clearing and washing—The kitchen—The little hearth—Pots and pans—Other utensils—Boxes and casks—Shelves—The sink and water-supply—The midday meal—The evening meal—_Sake_-drinking. Rice is the staple food of the Japanese; and no other food-stuff stands so high in popular esteem, or has a tutelary deity of its own. This rice-god has more shrines than any other deity, for he is worshipped everywhere, in town and village, and often a small shrine, no bigger than a hut, peeps amid a lonely cluster of trees surrounded on all sides by rice-paddies, its latticed door covered from top to bottom with the _ex-votos_ of the simple peasant folk. Under the feudal government the incomes of the territorial lords and their retainers were assessed, not in money, but in the quantity of rice that was annually brought into their granaries; and rice naturally became the standard for the valuation of all other commodities. The rice so garnered was subsequently converted into currency by exchange-brokers. Under the new regime, however, rice no longer holds the same pre-eminent position, but it still rules to a great extent the market for other goods. The fluctuations of its prices on the rice exchanges are eagerly watched by the whole nation; and references to the weather, especially in summer, invariably end in speculations as to its effect on the rice-crop, and the people put up unmurmuringly with the heavy solstitial rains because most rice-fields are paddies to which a plentiful supply of water is essential. Japan, in fact, is still an agricultural country, and the progress she has of late made in her manufacturing industry is not yet great enough to shake off the domination of agriculture, for no industrial problem agitates the nation so much as the annual question whether the country can