To this the old man replied: "When you go to Tokyo and see the graveyard at Aoyama you will behold there many monuments of generals and ministers of State. Their merits and their works in this world are described on those monuments. But do you know where the monument of the famous hero Kusunoki Masashige is? It is near Kobe, and it is not more than half as big as those monuments at Tokyo. Do you know where the monument of the great Taiko is? It is in Kyoto, but it is only recently that this monument was put up. Thus the monuments of our greatest heroes are small or have been erected recently. The reason is that it is unnecessary to raise big monuments for them because what they did in their lives was in itself their monument. They built their monument in the hearts of the people. Therefore we can never judge from the size of the monument the kind of work which was accomplished by the man who sleeps under it. Monuments are not only for ministers and warriors. We peasants can also erect monuments in our own way. To open a new paddy field, to plant the bare hillside with trees, these are our monuments. How lonely it would be for me if there were no monument left after my death. However small this paddy field may be, it will not be forgotten so long as it yields for your posterity the blessing of its rice crop." "Happily," the interpreter added, "the old man did not die so soon as he thought he would do. He lived for several years and planted the bare hillside with trees. Now the wood which grows there is worth 10,000 yen." A peasant proprietor expressed the conviction that goodness in a family was "not the result of its own efforts but of the accumulation of ancestral effort." The "ancestral merits and good spirit remain in the family." On the problem of rich and poor he quoted the proverb, "The very rich cannot remain very rich for more than three generations; a poor family cannot long remain poor." He said that he would be interested to know what I found to be "the causes of our villagers becoming good or bad." "For ourselves," he said, quoting another proverb, "'At the foot of the lighthouse it is dark.'" THE MOST EXACTING CROP IN THE WORLD CHAPTER VIII THE HARVEST FROM THE MUD _Toyo-ashiwara-no-chiiho-aki-mizuho-no-Kuni_ (Land of plenteous ears of rice in the plain of luxuriant reeds).