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is laid over these road crossings for pedestrians, the jinrickshas had to he carried across.
At Kasugasinden we parted with jinrickshas, not to see them again till Shibukawa (3 ri from Takasaki( on our way home, excepting four or five broken ones at Niigata.
From Kasugasinden the road goes for some distance along the right bank of the Sehigawa to Kuroi, situated on the sea shore near the mouth of that river, opposite Tamamatshi. From Kuroi we followed the sea shore up to Teradomari; on those parts where there is a beach there is no road properly speaking, but the strand is used as such, and one has the difficult choice of either dragging ones-self through the thick dusty sand in the burning sun, or of having our limbs tortured in a kago. Fortunately there happened a circumstance which left me no choice at all, as not only all our luggage, but also the kago had to be carried by women and even young girls, the male population of the villages being almost without exception fishermen; and though it was not perhaps directly to their pecuniary advantage, I had to refuse in most cases the help of a kago and to walk my way. One kago was carried by three, and another by four women at once. At larger or smaller distances the beach is bordered to the right by hills, sometimes grown with shrubs and dark pine-trees and consisting of hard clay; at other places there were downs of sand, grown with grass. Sometimes the hills border the sea, leaving no beach between, so that the road passes over them. This is first the case between Kuroi and Kakisaki, where the hills are very low and for the greater part built, on both sides, with houses and farms. Between Kakisaki and Hatsusaki the beach forms the road, and it was at Kakisaki that for the first time luggage and kagos were born by women. The villages between Kuroi and Hatsusaki are all poor in appearance and dirty. Hatsusaki is situated at the foot of tolerably high hills and close to the sea; from here the road passes over the hills to Kujiranami; the hills are grown with shrubs sad flowers and cultivated, the higher parts with corn, the
