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156 HONDA THE SAMURAI.
the village. Men who bought the right of wearing
swords were called "money-lifted samurai."
Young fellows who wore two swords were more
fond of fencing, horsemanship, and wrestling than of
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 fraternities
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 abacus,
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-