tt in the corner. We all sit around
the fire, on which turnips and rice are boiling and omelet is frying.
All around the ceiling from the smoky rafters hang strings of large
dried persimmons, almost as sweet and luscious as figs. These we munch
while Nakano cuts tenderloin steaks from half the carcass of a boar
which he speared the day before. In a few moments seven hungry
travellers are watching the sputtering, sizzling boar-steak as it wafts
its appetizing odors everywhere, as it seems, but up the chimney.

"Is this the second wild hog you've speared this winter?" asks Iwabuchi,
the interpreter.

"No, your honor," answers Nakano; "the snow began to fall ten days ago,
and this is the eighth hog I have killed; but yesterday I speared my
first boar this winter."

"How long have you been a hunter?"

"Hai! your honor, ever since I was a boy. I speared my first hog when I
was fifteen."

"What do you do with the boar's tusks?"

"Hai! your honor, they are the most valuable part of the animal. I sell
them to an agent of an ivory-carving shop in Tokio, who comes through
these parts in the spring. The Tokio men carve netsukes from them. They
are not as good as ivory, but they do for bimbo [poor men]. My own
netsuke is of boar's tusk."

"Meshi shitaku" (rice is ready), cried the housewife, at this moment,
and conversation was suspended. A little table of lacquered wood a foot
square and four inches high was set before each man of our party. With
chopsticks for the rice and knives for the boar-steak, we partook of the
hunter's fare. The march of eight miles in the frosty air, plodding our
way through drifts, and stepping on snow-shoes, which furnished good
exercise for our legs, had made us ravenously hungry. When full, and all
had said "Mo yoroshio" (even enough) to the polite girls who waited on
us, we walked out to the front, where a gaping crowd gazed at the
American white-face, as if they were at Barnum's, and he was the
Tattooed Man. I rushed at them, pretending to catch the children, when
they scattered like sheep. In their fright they tumbled over each other,
until a dozen or more were sprawling on the snow or had tumbled
head-foremost in the drifts. A smile, and the distribution of some
sugared cakes of peas and barley, made them good friends again. After an
hour's rest we bade the hunter, the villagers, and our snow-shoe men
good-by, and resumed our journey in single file over the mountains to
Tokio.

SE