Andrew's banquet. It would surely have stirred me to hold forth
on Scotland's glory to my fellow-countrymen in Japan; but this had
to be foregone. At Kiobe the steamer lay for twenty-four hours, and
this enabled us to run up by rail to Kioto, the former residence of
the Mikado, reputed to be the Paris of Japan. The city itself
deserves this reputation about as well as Cincinnati does that of
our American Paris, which I see some one has called it. Kioto is
only a mass of poor one-story buildings, but its situation is
beautiful, and cannot probably be equalled elsewhere in the Empire,
and this one can justly say of Cincinnati as well, while the beauty
of Paris is of the city and not at all rural. There are more pretty
toy villas embowered in trees upon the little hills about Kioto than
we saw in all other parts of Japan. The temples at Kioto are much
inferior to those at Shibba. Our journey enabled us to see about
seventy miles of the interior, and we were again impressed by the
evidences on every hand of a teeming population. Gangs of men and
women were everywhere at work upon small patches of ground, six or
seven persons being busily engaged sometimes on less than one acre.
It is not farming; there is in Japan scarcely such a thing as
farming in our sense; it is a system of gardening such as we see in
the neighborhood of large cities.
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