A Parting Gift—A Delicacy—Generosity—A Seaside Village—Pipichari's Advice—A Drunken Revel—Ito's Prophecies—The Kôchô's Illness—Patent Medicines.

SARUFUTO, YEZO, August 27.

I LEFT the Ainos yesterday with real regret, though I must confess that sleeping in one's clothes and the lack of ablutions are very fatiguing. Benri's two wives spent the early morning in the laborious operation of grinding millet into coarse flour, and before I departed, as their custom is, they made a paste of it, rolled it with their unclean fingers into well-shaped cakes, boiled them in the unwashed pot in which they make their stew of “ abominable things,” and presented them to me on a lacquer tray. They were distressed that I did not eat their food, and a woman went to a village at. some distance and brought me some venison fat as a delicacy. All those of whom I had seen much came to wish me good-bye, and they brought so many presents (including a fine bearskin) that I should have needed an additional horse to carry them had I accepted but one-half.

I rode twelve miles through the forest to Mombets, where I intended to spend Sunday, but I had the worst horse I ever rode, and we took five hours. The day was dull and sad, threatening a storm, and when we got out of the forest, upon a sand-hill covered with oak scrub, we encountered a most furious wind. Among the many views which I have seen, that is one to be remembered. Below lay a bleached and bare sand-hill, with a few grey houses huddled in its miserable shelter, and a heaped-up shore of grey sand, on which a brown-grey sea was breaking with clash and boom in long, white, ragged lines, with all beyond a confusion of surf, surge, and mist, with driving brown clouds mingling sea and sky, and all between showing only in glimpses amidst scuds of sand.

At a house in the scrub a number of men were drinking saké with much uproar, and a superb-looking Aino came out, staggered a few yards, and then fell backwards among the weeds, a picture of debasement.