An Infamous Road—Monotonous Greenery—Abysmal Dirt—Low Lives— The Tsugawa Tadoya—Politeness—A Shipping Port—A “Barbarian Devil.”

TSUGAWA, July 2.

YESTERDAY'S journey WAS one of the most severe I have yet had, for in ten hours of hard travelling I only accomplished fifteen miles. The road from Kurumatogé westwards is so infamous that the stages are sometimes little more than a mile. Yet it is by it, so far at least as the Tsugawa river that the produce and manufactures of the rich plain of Aidzu, with its numerous towns, and of a ver)'· large interior district, must find an outlet at Niigata. In defiance of all modern ideas, it goes straight up and straight down hill, at a gradient that I should be afraid to hazard a guess at, and at present it is a perfect quagmire, into which great stones have been thrown, some of which have subsided edgewise, and others have disappeared altogether. It is the very worst road I ever rode over, and that is saying a good deal! Kurumatogé was the last of seventeen mountain-passes, over 2000 feet high, which I have crossed since leaving Nikkô. Between it and Tsugawa the scenery, though on a smaller scale, is of much the same character as hitherto—hills wooded to their tops, cleft, by ravines which open out occasionally to divulge more distant ranges, all smothered in greeneiy, which, when I am ill-pleased, I am inclined to call “rank vegetation.” Oh that an abrupt scaur, or a strip of flaming desert, or something salient and brilliant, would break in, however discordantly, upon this monotony of green !

The villages of that district must, I think, have reached the lowest abyss of filthiness in Hozawa and Saikaiyama. Fowls, dogs, horses, and people herded together in sheds black with wood smoke, and manure heaps drained into the wells. No young boy wore any clothing. Few of the men wore anything but the maro, the women were unclothed to their waists, and such clothing as they had was very dirty, “and held together by mere force of habit.