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Show Japan's Patch-Work Farms. Why, the whole country looks like a piece of crazy patch-work. In shapes as fantastic as ever our grandmothers cut from odd scraps of silk and velvet, to piece laboriously together with a "cat-stitch" "cat-stitch" done In multi-colored flosees. And this is why, perhaps, that In the wheat-thrashing and rice-planting season sea-son the country looks so lively, crowded as it Is with laborers, a whole family on each little patch of ground, bobbing about under their huge mushroom-shaped mushroom-shaped sun hats. And they are happy, these odd little folks, although the best of them make hardly more than fifty or seventy-five dollars a year, upon which families must be reared and educated. Riding in a JInrlklsha along the narrow-roads narrow-roads between the rice llelds, one passes group after group, knee deep In the unspeakably un-speakably filthy mud, laughing and Blnging and playing about their work like a lot of happy children. The process pro-cess of rlce-ralslng Is not the simplest thing in tho world, and, considering the fact that there are practically no farm animals in Japan, and only the rnost primitive of agricultural implement?, with which half the farm land has been literally made in terrace beds upon the mountain slopes, the success attained by the people is remarkable. Eleanor Franklin In Leslie's Weekly |