narrow path and the sore toes of the old pine tree, telling of the hundreds that come and go; it is seen in the dress and pose of the ladies, and one may be sure the photographer felt all that he saw and fixed so well.
The vender of Oumi's lily that Margaret Johnson saw, is in Fig. 239. There another is bartering for a spray of flowers, and thus one sold the branch of red maple leaves in our room at the Nara inn. His floral stands are borne along the streets pendant from the usual carrying pole.
When returning to the city from the Kyoto Experiment Station several fields of Japanese indigo were passed, growing in water under the conditions of ordinary rice culture, Fig. 240 being a view of one of these. The plant is Poligonum tinctoria, a close relative of the smartweed. Before the importation of aniline and alizarin dyes, which amounted in 1907 to 160,558 pounds and 7,170,320 pounds respectively, the cultivation of indigo was much more extensive than at present, amounting in 1897 to 160,460,000 pounds of the dried leaves; but in 1906 the production had fallen to 58,696,000 pounds, forty-five per cent of which was grown in the prefecture of Tokushima in the eastern part of the island of Shikoku. The population of this prefecture is 707,565, or 4.4 people to each of the 159,450 acres of cultivated field, and yet 19,969 of these acres bore the indigo crop, leaving more than five people to each food-producing acre.
The plants for this crop are started in nursery beds in February and transplanted in May, the first crop being cut the last of June or first of July, when the fields are again fertilized, the stubble throwing out new shoots and yielding a second cutting the last of August or early September. A crop of barley may have preceded one of indigo, or the indigo may be set following a crop of rice. Such practice, with the high fertilization for every crop, goes a long way toward supplying the necessary food. The dense population, too, has permitted the manufacture of the indigo as a home industry among the farmers, enabling them to exchange the spare labor of the family for
