Only one family in the village, I learnt from the headman, was being helped from public funds. This family consisted of an old man and his daughter, who, owing to the attendance her father required, could not go out to work. The village provided a small house and three pints of rice daily. The headman in his private capacity gave the girl, with the assistance of some friends, straw rope-making to do and paid a somewhat higher price than is usual. Of last year's births in the village 10 per cent. had been legally and 5 per cent. actually illegitimate. Four or five births had occurred a few months after marriage. We ate our lunch in the headman's room in the village office. Hanging from the ceiling was a sealed envelope to be opened on receipt of a telegram. Some member of the village staff always slept in that room. The envelope contained instructions to be acted upon if mobilisation took place. When we had gone on some distance I stopped to watch a farmer's wife and daughter threshing in a barn by pulling the rice through a row of steel teeth, the simple form of threshing implement which is seen in slightly different patterns all over Japan. (It is the successor of a contrivance of bamboo stakes.) The women told me that one person could thresh fourteen bushels a day. The implement cost 2-1/2 yen from travelling vendors but only 1-1/2 yen from the co-operative society. While we talked the farmer appeared. I apologised to him for unwittingly stepping on the threshold of the barn--that is, the grooved timber in which the sliding doors run. It is considered to be an insult to the head of the house to tread on the threshold as in some way "standing on the householder's head." This man had a bamboo plantation, and he told me, in reply to a question, that the bamboo would shoot up at the rate of more than a foot in twenty-four hours. (During the month in which this is dictated I have measured the growth of a shoot of a Dorothy Perkins climber and find that it averages about quarter of an inch in twenty-four hours.) FOOTNOTES: [185] See Appendix XII. CHAPTER XXVIII MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES (SHIMANE) Nothing but omniscience could suffice to answer all the questions implicitly raised.--J.G. FRAZER When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow, coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end. Two-thirds of the journey must be made on foot and by _kuruma_.[186] Some talk by the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the hills to cut grass for their "cattle," the average number of cattle per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts. It seemed strange to see buckwheat at the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several months before. The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in spring and autumn.