On the admirable main road we passed many pack ponies carrying immense pieces of timber. Speaking of timber, the economical method of preserving wood by charring is widely practised in Japan. The palisades around houses and gardens and even the boards of which the walls or the lower part of the walls of dwellings are constructed are often charred. The effect is not cheerful. What does have a cheerful and trim effect is a thing constantly under one's notice, the habit of keeping carefully swept the unpaved earth enclosed by a house and buildings as well as the path or roadway to them. This careful sweeping is usually regarded as the special work of old people. Even old ladies in families of rank in Tokyo take pleasure in their daily task of sweeping. When we had crossed the pass and descended on the other side and taken _kuruma_ we soon came to a wide but absolutely dry river bed. The high embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which, walking behind our _kuruma_, it took us exactly four minutes to cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the floods that afflict the country. The rock-and rubble-choked condition of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places hillsides were pointed out to me which, bare a generation ago, are now covered with trees. Within a distance of twenty-five miles hill plantations were producing fruit to a yearly value of half a million yen. As for the cultivation on either side of the roadway, along which our _kurumaya_ were trotting us, I could not see a weed anywhere. A favourite rural recreation in Ehime, as in Shimane on the mainland, is bull fighting. It is not, however, fighting with bulls but between bulls: the sport has the redeeming feature that the animals are not turned loose on one another but are held all the time by their owners by means of the rope attached to the nose ring. The rope is gripped quite close to the bull's head. The result of this measure of control is, it was averred, that a contest resolves itself into a struggle to decide not which bull can fight better but which animal can push harder with his head. That the bulls are occasionally injured there can be no doubt. The contests are said to last from fifteen to twenty minutes and are decided by one of the combatants turning tail. There is a good deal of gambling on the issue. In another prefecture of Shikoku the rustics enjoy struggles between muzzled dogs. A taste for this sport is also cultivated in Akita. A certain amount of dog and cock fighting goes on in Tokyo.