A favourite pastime of the _’ricksha_ men on the cab-stands as they wait for a fare is to draw in the dust of the roadway one against the other. If sand has been spilled from a cart anywhere within reach the whole _’ricksha_ stand migrates and has the happiest time. I have seen really good outlines of Fujiyama and of flying birds, or blossoming flowers, all on the roadways by the _’ricksha_ stands. And whatever their faults, they at least had life, for the _’ricksha_ man has knowledge, knowledge based on intelligent observation and on the inherited training of his race. In the Japanese language there is a word, _edaburi_, which means “the formation or the arrangement of the branches of a tree.” Merely to possess such a word shows the long training in art and observation which the nation must have undergone. But this word is not a technical term used only by artists and the cultured classes; it is a living, breathing expression, part of the vocabulary of every Japanese, even the Board School educated. _Kurumaya_ discuss _edaburi_ in the streets of Tokyo. Railway porters at wayside stations argue the matter with the stationmaster. Every peasant knows, understands, and talks of the matter as though he had brought himself up on long courses of Ruskin. It has often been a subject of great regret to me that Ruskin did not know the Japanese, for in them he would have found the living proof of so much of his teaching. But the people of Japan not only discuss _edaburi_, they write poetry. There is an exceedingly simple form of poetry called _hokku_. It consists of only three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and is written in the language of daily life. The _hokku_ was invented by a man called Bashō, for the definite ethical purpose of cultivating the taste and improving the morals of the people. He believed in the composition of poetry as an ethical force, and he wished to bring it from the home of the educated into the lives of the poor. He succeeded. Not because the _hokku_ is a so much easier form of poetry than the English couplet, but because the people have taste, and art, and civilisation in the very cells of their brains. Every one writes poetry, even the typical _jinricksha_ man, who is to the Japanese what the _charbonnier_ is to the French or the coster to us. When the _kurumaya_ and his wife go to visit their relations the whole party amuses itself by composing these tiny poems. On all occasions of joy and grief, on birth, death and marriage, at the time of each flower festival, or of any other happening, the people compose poetry. Literary composition has always been inculcated as the best medicine for sorrow, and as such is practised daily.