I visited a vigorous personality who was at once a landowner and rural oculist, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He had graduated at Tokyo and had kept himself abreast of German specialist literature. There was accommodation for about a hundred patients in the buildings attached to his house. He believed in the efficacy in eye cases of "the air of the rice fields," not to speak of the shrine which overlooks the patients' quarters. As the number of blind people in Japan is appalling,[207] it was interesting to hear the opinion that the chief causes were gonorrhœa, inadequate attention at birth, insufficient nourishment in childhood and nervous disease--all more or less preventible. Nearly a quarter of my host's patients had had their eyes wounded by rice-stem points while stooping in the paddies. As the people are hurt in the busy season they often put off coming for help until it is too late. The landowner-oculist's premises were lighted by natural gas from a depth of 900 ft. According to a fellow-guest, who happened to be an expert in this matter, natural gas is to be had all over Japan.[208] The room in which I slept belonged to a part of the house which was of great age, but by my _futon_ there was laid an electric torch. A pleasant thing during my visit was the presence of a dozen intelligent, kindly students who early in the evening came and knelt in a semicircle round us, "in order to profit by our talk." One of them, a son of the house, an athlete (and now, after travelling in Europe, his father's successor), did all sorts of services for me during my stay, in the simple-hearted fashion that shows such an attractive side of the Japanese character. One question asked by the students was, "For what reasons does _Sensei_ believe that the influence of women in public life would be good?" Another enquiry was, "Which are the best London and Paris papers?" These lads could hardly hope to get through the university before they were twenty-five or twenty-six. Yet, compared with our undergraduates, they had very little time for general reading, discussions and outdoor sports. I remember a man of some experience in the educational world saying to me, "Our students do not read enough apart from their studies; it is their misfortune." They have not only the burden of having to learn nearly several thousand ideographs,[209] three scripts and Japanese and Chinese pronunciation. They have to acquire Western languages, which, owing to their absolute dissimilarity from Oriental tongues--for example, the word for "I" is _watakushi_--must be learnt entirely from memory. It is not that the Japanese student does not begin early as well as leave off late. A professor once said to me, "For some little time after I first went to school I was still fed from the bosom of my mother." In some ways it is no doubt a source of strength for Japan that her men can spend from their earliest years to