Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, page 280 by Isabella L. Bird
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oon, and I got a great many more words from him. The house-master, who is the Kocho of Sarufuto, paid me a courteous visit, and in the evening sent to say that he would be very glad of some medicine, for he was "very ill and going to have fever." He had caught a bad cold and sore throat, had bad pains in his limbs, and was bemoaning himself ruefully. To pacify his wife, who was very sorry for him, I gave him some "Cockle's Pills" and the trapper's remedy of "a pint of hot water with a pinch of cayenne pepper," and left him moaning and bundled up under a pile of futons, in a nearly hermetically sealed room, with a hibachi of charcoal vitiating the air. This morning when I went and inquired after him in a properly concerned tone, his wife told me very gleefully that he was quite well and had gone out, and had left 25 sen for some more of the medicines that I had given him, so with great gravity I put up some of Duncan and Flockhart's most pungent cayenne pepper, and showed her how much to use. She was not content, however, without some of the "Cockles," a single box of which has performed six of those "miraculous cures" which rejoice the hearts and fill the pockets of patent medicine makers!
I. L. B.
LETTER XXXIX
A Welcome Gift--Recent Changes--Volcanic Phenomena--Interesting Tufa Cones--Semi-strangulation--A Fall into a Bear-trap--The Shiraoi Ainos--Horsebreaking and Cruelty.
OLD MORORAN, VOLCANO BAY, YEZO, September 2.
After the storm of Sunday, Monday was a grey, still, tender day, and the ranges of wooded hills were bathed in the richest indigo colouring. A canter of seventeen miles among the damask roses on a very rough horse only took me to Yubets, whose indescribable loneliness fascinated me into spending a night there again, and encountering a wild clatter of wind and rain; and another canter of seven miles the next morning took me to Tomakomai, where I rejoined my kuruma, and after a long delay, three trotting Ainos took me to Shiraoi, where the "clear shining a