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156 HONDA THE SAMURAI. the village. Men who bought the right of wearing swords were called "money-lifted samurai." Young fond of fencing, horsemanship, and wrestling than of fellows who wore two swords were more books. Their whole talk and reading was about the fighting heroes of old days, and their swords they looked on as their very souls. Many of them would probably have starved before doing manual labor. One of their favorite proverbs was " Though an eagle be starving, it will not eat grain." They formed parties and cliques among themselves, and were often rough to each other, especially when they played the Genji and He*ik6 fight. In walking through the country, if a farmer or lower-class man were riding on his pack-horse and did not instantly dismount when he saw a samurai coming, or if he jostled a gentleman or was rude to him, the man of swords was very apt to draw blade and murder him. The sight of dead men lying in their own blood on the roadside was no rare thing. There was usually a good deal of jealousy between the ignorant fencing experts who could hardly write a letter correctly and those who were close students of books, and the societies or frater- nities of the one sort usually excluded men of the other kind. Even men who trained their sons to a knowledge of arithmetic, or calculation on the aba- cus, did it with the idea of getting them lucrative offices, such as those of treasurer and tax-collector. No slates, pencils, blackboards, or chalk were used in school, but instead the abacus, or box of balls sliding on rods, was employed. On this counting-
MEN, MONKEYS, HOUSES, AND SOTS. 157 machine subtraction, multiplication, division, frac- tions, decimals, extraction of square and cube root, and many other arithmetical problems can be done much more rapidly than by our common methods. In old time, when Mr. Honda was a boy, the only books and literature studied were Chinese, which is to Japanese very much as Latin is to English. Through the influence of Mr. Rai, Doctor Sano, and men of like mind Japanese was introduced and seri- ously studied for the first time about the year that Rai Taro first entered school. A few were beginning to master Dutch, and these found it such hard work that, though they persevered, they were called by the fencing boys of old-fashioned methods " paleface-and-big-top-knot fellows." The ultra conservatives also despised the students of arithmetic, which had been introduced into the course of studies after a struggle, considering that men who had handled money, whether samurai or traders, must necessarily be thieves. In this they were not so far wrong, for in the day of spies and bribery and oppression of one class by another, two and two did not commonly make four. Among the shopkeepers too the idea seemed to be to get rich by defrauding customers, and then to lock up the money in a strong-box or to bury it in the ground. Between the idle privi- leged classes and the toiler without right or proper protection against the strong or insolent there was little love lost. Before the age of thirteen the son of a samurai was necessarily a vassal or retainer of the lord in
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156 HONDA THE SAMURAI.<br />
the village. Men who bought the right of wearing<br />
swords were called "money-lifted samurai."<br />
Young<br />
fond of fencing, horsemanship, and wrestling than of<br />
fellows who wore two swords were more<br />
books. Their whole talk and reading was about the<br />
fighting heroes of old days, and their swords they<br />
looked on as their very souls. Many of them would<br />
probably have starved before doing manual labor.<br />
One of their favorite proverbs was " Though an eagle<br />
be starving, it will not eat grain." They formed<br />
parties and cliques among themselves, and were often<br />
rough to each other, especially when they played the<br />
Genji and He*ik6 fight. In walking through the<br />
country, if a farmer or lower-class man were riding on<br />
his pack-horse and did not instantly dismount when<br />
he saw a samurai coming, or if he jostled a gentleman<br />
or was rude to him, the man of swords was very apt<br />
to draw blade and murder him. The sight of dead<br />
men lying in their own blood on the roadside was no<br />
rare thing. There was usually a good deal of jealousy<br />
between the ignorant fencing experts who could<br />
hardly write a letter correctly and those who were<br />
close students of books, and the societies or frater-<br />
nities of the one sort usually excluded men of the<br />
other kind. Even men who trained their sons to<br />
a knowledge of arithmetic, or calculation on the aba-<br />
cus, did it with the idea of getting them lucrative<br />
offices, such as those of treasurer and tax-collector.<br />
No slates, pencils, blackboards, or chalk were used<br />
in school, but instead the abacus, or box of balls<br />
sliding on rods, was employed. On this counting-