ere spelled I-new
with a long I.

These are the people who inhabited Japan before the present Japanese
entered the land from Korea and drove them, inch by inch, back and north
and west across Japan. It was a stubborn fight, and it has lasted many
centuries; but to-day they have been driven up on the island of
Hokkaido, that northern frontier of Japan where the overflow of Japan is
pouring at the rate of four thousand a year, making two million to date
and only about fifty thousand of them Ainus.

"Are they like our American Indians in looks, since their history is so
much like them?" I asked my missionary friend.

"Wait until you see them, and decide for yourself. I know very little
about American Indians."

So one morning at three o'clock, after traveling for two days and nights
from one end of Japan to the other, and then crossing a strait between
the Japan Sea and the Pacific Ocean to the island, we climbed from our
train, and landed in a little country railroad station.

It was blowing a blizzard, and the snow crashed into our faces with
stinging, whip-like snaps.

I was appointed stoker for the small stove in the station while the
rest of the party tried to sleep on the benches arranged in a circle,
huddled as close as they could get to the stove.

We were the first party of foreigners of this size that had ever honored
the village with a visit. And in addition to that we had come at an
unearthly hour.

Who but a group of insane foreigners would drop into a town at three
o'clock in the morning with a blizzard blowing? Either we were insane,
or we had some sinister motives. Perhaps we were making maps of the
seacoast.

And before daylight half of the town was peeking in through the windows
at us. Then the policemen came. They were Japanese policemen, and did
not take any chances on us. Even after our interpreter had told them
that we were a group of scientists who had come to visit the Ainus they
still followed us around most of the morning, keeping polite track of
our movements.

About five o'clock that morning, as I was trying to catch a cat-nap, the
newsboys of the village came to get the morning papers which had come in
on the train on which we had arrived. They unbundled the papers in the
cold station; their breath forming clouds of vapor; laughing and joking
as they unrolled, folded and counted the papers; and arranged their
routes for morning delivery.

It took me back to boyhood days down in W