t of April, 1960.

"All?" asked Komoru, the Professor's secretary.

"We four," replied Oshima, indicating those at the table, "the
children will stay with my mother. I'll need your assistance, and as
for Miss Ethel, she cannot well stay here, so I have had you two
listed. Although it's a little irregular, I am sure it will not be
questioned, for I know more about American soils than any other man
in Japan."

Ethel glanced apprehensively at Komoru. She had never quite
understood her own attitude toward that taciturn young Japanese whom
she had seen daily for two years without hardly making his
acquaintance. She admired him and yet she feared him.

Professor Oshima was saying that she had been "listed" with Komoru
for some great journey. What did it mean? What could she do? Again
she looked up at the secretary; but far from seeing any trace of
scheme or plot in his enigmatical countenance, she found him to be
considering the situation with the same equanimity with which he
would have recorded the calcium content of a soil sample.

As for Professor and Madame Oshima, they seemed equally unruffled
about the proposed journey, and not at all inclined to elucidate the
mystery. Experience had taught the younger woman that when
information was not offered it was unwise to ask questions, so when
the Professor busied himself with much ransacking of his pamphlets
and papers and his wife became equally occupied with overhauling the
family wardrobe and getting the children off to their grandmother's,
Ethel accepted unquestionably the statement that she would be
limited to twenty kilograms of clothing and ten kilograms of other
personal effects, and lent assistance as best she could to the
enterprise in hand.

On the third day the little party, with their light luggage boarded
a train for Hakodate, at which point they arrived at noon. Hurrying
along the docks among others burdened like themselves, they came to
a great low-lying, turtle-topped warship; and, passing down a
gangway, entered the brilliantly lighted interior.

The constant flood of new passengers came, not in mixed and motley
groups, as the ordinary crowd of passengers, but by two, male and
female, as the unclean beasts into the ark. And they were all young
in years and athletic in frame--the very cream and flower of the
race.

[Illustration: Every few seconds an aeroplane shot into the air and
joined the endless winged line.]

Late that evening the vessel