. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. agon-flies—Molesand Worms—Curious Superstition—Committee Fever and DameNatures Soothing Syrup. TARTLING was the contrast of my lot in/ Tokio with the free mountain life in India Ihad just left. Here I was now, at all eventsalmost like the Dutch in Deshima, cooped upin a dreary concession—a few acres of flat,reedy, forced ground, giving no chance evenwhen duty permitted of enjoying a rustic walk withoutfirst crossing monotonous miles of uninviting streets. Theprospect was especially dreary to one who, though in nosense a naturalist,
. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. agon-flies—Molesand Worms—Curious Superstition—Committee Fever and DameNatures Soothing Syrup. TARTLING was the contrast of my lot in/ Tokio with the free mountain life in India Ihad just left. Here I was now, at all eventsalmost like the Dutch in Deshima, cooped upin a dreary concession—a few acres of flat,reedy, forced ground, giving no chance evenwhen duty permitted of enjoying a rustic walk withoutfirst crossing monotonous miles of uninviting streets. Theprospect was especially dreary to one who, though in nosense a naturalist, has always found in nature a chiefrecreation and pleasure. So to console myself I set about to cultivate a garden—not a frame wherein to set trim Italian parterres, but simplya place to group trees, shrubs, and plants, leaving them togrow pretty much as Nature herself had trained them todo. The soil was damp, and when you dug down to adistance of two feet the trench filled with water like sandat the sea-shore. This water was brackish, too, and in-. 226 Nine Years in Nip on. creased with the pressure of the rising tide, rising sometime after it rose, and sinking tardily with the ebb. Iexamined it frequently in the microscope, and found it tobe swarming with minute organisms of many kinds. Thisfact had a very important relation locally, I thought, totwo epidemics of cholera which visited that crowded dis-trict, carrying off many victims in quite a systematic way. Great multitudes of frogs haunted this reedy flat, andone day when crossing a portion of it, after continueddrought, there was a sudden heavy fall of rain. A fewminutes afterwards I saw that the ground was teemingwith tiny frogs, and one would naturally have supposedthat they had rained from the clouds. I found, however,that they were radiating in tens of thousands from an oldmarshy spot in Tsukiji—the district in which the con-cession lies—had quite recently been filled up. After Igot our bit of ground dra
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