Page:Japanese Physical Training (Hancock).djvu/48

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Japanese Physical Training

care to eat more just now. I have five hours more of work to do this afternoon."

"How about your friends here? Have they brought no more to eat than you have done?"

"Perhaps," came the smiling, shrugging response. "They will show you."

A woman near by had in a little tin something like three heaping tablespoonfuls of cooked rice. Another produced from her bundle two raw tomatoes and a thin rice cake of a diameter of a little more than two inches. A child had two similar rice cakes and an apple. And this gives a very fair idea of what these hard-working people found sufficiently nourishing food on which to do five hours more work of coal-passing. Returning to the man whom I had first questioned I inquired:

"What did you eat for breakfast this morning?"

"Oh, something very nice—a bowl of rice with a few little strips of dried fish."

"And what will you eat to-night, when your day's work is done?"

"I do not know. That is for my wife to say. Probably she will give me some boiled