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ONE:One night early in December Norah Propert was busily engaged in the sitting-room of her brother��s house just off the market-place at Bracebridge. She had left him over a book and a cigarette in the dining-room, and as soon as she had finished her supper had gone across the passage to her work again. The room was very simply decorated: to Mrs Keeling��s plush-and-mirror eye it would have seemed to be hardly decorated at all. There were a few framed photographs or cheap reproductions of famous pictures on the walls, a book-case held some three hundred volumes, the floor had a fawn-coloured drugget on it, and there was not a square inch of plush anywhere.Village after village was passed by our young adventurers and their[Pg 163] older companion, and many scenes of Japanese domestic life were unfolded to their eyes. At one place some men were engaged in removing the hulls from freshly gathered rice. The grain was in large tubs, made of a section of a tree hollowed out, and the labor was performed by beating the grain with huge mallets. The process was necessarily slow, and required a great deal of patience. This mode of hulling rice has been in use in Japan for hundreds of years, and will probably continue for hundreds of years to come in spite of the improved machinery that is being introduced by foreigners. Rice is the principal article of food used in Japan, and many people have hardly tasted anything else in the whole course of their lives. The opening of the foreign market has largely increased the cost of rice; and in this way the entrance of Japan into the family of nations has brought great hardships upon the laboring classes. It costs three times as much for a poor man to support his family as it did before the advent of the strangers, and there has not been a corresponding advance in wages. Life for the coolie was bad enough under the old form of government, and he had much to complain of. His condition has not been bettered by the new order of things, according to the observation of impartial foreigners who reside in Yokohama and other of the open ports.