Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife by Marietta Holley (life changing books TXT) 📗

The next mornin’, after tiffen, which wuz what they call breakfast, bein’ just so ignorant of good Jonesville language, Josiah and I and Tommy sallied out to see what we could see, the rest of our party havin’ gone out before.

Wantin’ to go a considerable ways, we hired two jinrikishas, and I took Tommy in my lap, and I must say that I felt considerable like a baby in a baby carriage carryin’ a doll; but I got over it and felt like a grandma before I had gone fur. How Josiah felt I don’t know, though I hearn him disputin’ with the man about his prices––we had took a interpreter with us so we could know what wuz said to us. The price for a jinrikisha is five sen, and Josiah thought it meant five cents of our money, and so handed it to him. But the man wuz so ignorant he didn’t know anything about Jonesville money, and he kep’ a-callin’ for sen, and the interpreter sez “Sen,” holdin’ up his five fingers and speakin’ it up loud, and I hearn Josiah say:

“Well, you fool, you, I have given you five cents! What more do you want?” But at last he wuz made to understand; but when Josiah made him know where he wanted to go the interpreter said that the sedan carriers wanted a yen, and my poor pardner had another struggle. Sez he:

“You consarned fool, how do you spoze I can give you a hen? Do you spoze I can git into my hen house ten thousand milds off to git you a hen? Or do you want me to steal one for you?”

“A yen,” sez the interpreter, and the way he said it it did sound like hen.

“Well, I said hen, didn’t I?” said my pardner.

But I leaned out of my baby cart and sez, “Y-e-n, Josiah. A yen is their money, a dollar.”

“Oh, why don’t they call it a cow or a brindle calf?” He wuz all het up by his efforts to understand. They call one of their dollars a yen, a sen is a cent, and a rin is the tenth part of a cent. Josiah fell in love with the copper rins with square holes in the centre. Sez he:

“How I would love to furnish you with ’em, Samantha, when you went to the store in Jonesville. I would hand you out five or six rins and you could string ’em and wear ’em round your neck till you got to the store.”

“Yes,” sez I, “half a cent would go a good ways in buyin’ family stores.”

“Well, it would have a rich look, Samantha, and I mean to make some when I git home. Why, Ury and I could make hundreds of ’em out of our old copper kettle that has got a hole in it, and I shouldn’t wonder if I could pass ’em.”

Miss Meechim had a idee that the Japans wuz in a state of barbarism, but Arvilly who wuz always at swords’ pints with her threw such a lot of statistics at her that it fairly danted her. There are six hundred newspapers in Japan. The Japanese daily at Tokio has a circulation of 300,000. She has over 3,000 milds of railroads and uses the American system of checking baggage. Large factories with the best machinery has been built late years, but a great part of the manufacturing is done by the people in their own homes, where they turn out those exquisite fabrics of silk and cotton and rugs of all the colors of the rainbow, and seemingly as fadeless as that bow. Slavery is unknown, and there is very little poverty with all the crowded population. The Japans are our nearest neighbors acrost the Pacific and we’ve been pretty neighborly with ’em, havin’ bought from ’em within the last ten years most three hundred millions worth of goods. She would miss us if anything should happen to us.

Yokohama is a city of 124,000 inhabitants, most all Japans, though in what they call the settlement there are 196 fifteen or twenty thousand foreigners. There are beautiful homes here with flower gardens containing the rarest and most beautiful flowers, trees and shrubs of all kinds.

The day Josiah had his struggle with the interpreter and Japan money we rode down the principal streets of Yokohama. And I would stop at some of the silk shops, though Josiah objected and leaned out of his jinrikisha and sez anxiously:

“Don’t spend more’n half a dozen rins, Samantha, on dress, for you know we’ve got more than 10,000 milds to travel and the tarven bills are high.”

Sez I in real dry axents, “If I conclude to buy a dress I shall have to have as much as a dozen rins; I don’t believe that I could git a handsome and durable one for less.” My tone was sarcastical. The idee of buyin’ a silk dress for half a cent! But I didn’t lay out to buy; I wuz jest lookin’ round.

I saw in those shops some of the most beautiful silks and embroideries that I ever did see, and I went into a lacquer shop where there wuz the most elegant furniture and rich bronzes inlaid with gold and silver. They make the finest bronzes in the world; a little pair of vases wuz fifteen hundred dollars and you couldn’t get ’em for less. But why shouldn’t there be beautiful things in a country where every one is a artist?

We stopped at a tea house and had a cup of tea, delicious as I never spozed tea could be and served by pretty young girls with gay colored, loose silk suits and hair elaborately dressed up with chains and ornaments; their feet and legs wuz bare, but they wuz covered with ornaments of brass and jade. Afterwards we passed fields of rice where men and wimmen wuz working, the men enrobed in their skin toilette of dragons and other figures and loin cloth and the wimmen in little scanty skirts comin’ from the waist to the knees. Their wages are eight cents a day. I wondered what some of our haughty kitchen rulers, who demand a dollar a day and the 197 richest of viands would say if they wuz put down on a basis of eight cents a day and water and rice diet.

The little bamboo cottages are lovely lookin’ from the outside with their thatched roofs, some on ’em with little bushes growin’ out on the thatch and little bunches of grass growin’ out under the eaves. The children of the poor