Their Own Impression Is That They Are Now
Increasing In Numbers After Diminishing For Many Years.
I left Usu
sleeping in the loveliness of an autumn noon with great regret.
No
place that I have seen has fascinated me so much.
LETTER XL - (Continued)
The Sea-shore - A "Hairy Aino" - A Horse Fight - The Horses of Yezo -
"Bad Mountains" - A Slight Accident - Magnificent Scenery - A Bleached
Halting-Place - A Musty Room - Aino "Good-breeding."
A charge of 3 sen per ri more for the horses for the next stage,
because there were such "bad mountains to cross," prepared me for
what followed - many miles of the worst road for horses I ever saw.
I should not have complained if they had charged double the price.
As an almost certain consequence, it was one of the most
picturesque routes I have ever travelled. For some distance,
however, it runs placidly along by the sea-shore, on which big,
blue, foam-crested rollers were disporting themselves noisily, and
passes through several Aino hamlets, and the Aino village of Abuta,
with sixty houses, rather a prosperous-looking place, where the
cultivation was considerably more careful, and the people possessed
a number of horses. Several of the houses were surrounded by
bears' skulls grinning from between the forked tops of high poles,
and there was a well-grown bear ready for his doom and apotheosis.
In nearly all the houses a woman was weaving bark-cloth, with the
hook which holds the web fixed into the ground several feet outside
the house.
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