In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the life of Old Japan. I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame. The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only. Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect." My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for his children's or his parents' health. At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but note the cluster of readers at the open fronts of bookshops.[187] On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a _kuruma_ with wooden wheels, and in the hills the day after we passed a man kneeling in a _kago_, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a _basha_ we discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth. It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pass this way. My companion frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people said. We saw an extinct volcano called "Green Field Mountain." There was not a tree on it and it was said never to have possessed any. The whole surface was closely cut, the patches cut at different periods showing up in rectangular strips of varying shades. Wherever the hills were treeless and too steep for cultivation they were carefully cut for fodder. In cultivable places houses were standing on the minimum of ground. More than once we had a view of a characteristic piece of scenery, a dashing stream seen through a clump of bamboo.