Be independent and pure and strive to make your characters more beautiful. Expand your thought. Help each other to accomplish your ambitions. Be active and steady and do not lose your self-control. Be faithful to friends and righteous and polite. Be silent and keep order. Do not be luxurious (_sic_). Keep everything clean. Pay attention to sanitation. Do not neglect physical exercises. Be diligent and develop your intelligence. The borrower of the 4,000 yen with which the institution was built managed to pay it back within seven years with interest, out of the subscriptions of residents and ex-residents. An agricultural authority whom I met spoke of "farming families living from hand to mouth and their land slipping into the possession of landlords"; also of a fifth of the peasants in the prefecture being tenants. A young novelist who had been wandering about the Suwa district had been impressed by the grim realities of life in poor farmers' homes and cited facts on which he based a low view of rural morality. Suwa Lake lies more than 3,500 ft. above sea level and in winter is covered with skaters. The country round about is remarkable agriculturally for the fact that many farmers are able to lead into their paddies not only warm water from the hot springs but water from ammonia springs, so economising considerably in their expenditure on manure. A simple windmill for lifting the fertilising water is sold for only 4 yen. We went to Kōfu, the capital of Yamanashi prefecture, through many mountain tunnels and ravines. Entrancing is the just word for this region in the vicinity of the Alps. But joy in the beauty through which we passed is tinged for the student of rural life by thoughts of the highlander's difficulties in getting a living in spots where quiet streams may become in a few hours ungovernable torrents. I remember glimpses of grapes and persimmons, of parties of middle-school boys tramping out their holiday--every inn reduces its terms for them--and of half a dozen peasant girls bathing in a shaded stream. But there were less pleasing scenes: hills deforested and paddies wrecked by a waste of stones and gravel flung over them in time of flood. Here and there the indomitable farmers, counting on the good behaviour of the river for a season or two, were endeavouring, with enormous labour, to resume possession of what had been their own. The spectacle illustrated at once their spirit and their industry and their need of land. At night we slept at Kōfu at "the inn of greeting peaks." In the morning a Governor with imagination told me of the prefecture's gallant enterprises in afforestation and river embanking at expenditures which were almost crippling. FOOTNOTES: [135] The three leading silk prefectures are in order: Nagano, Fukushima and Gumma. [136] At this time of the year, when the rice plants are small, the water in the paddies is still conspicuous.