In the evening, after another treat to coffee and tea cakes at Miss Bryant’s, we went to Kutoroge’s house to draw up the necessary documents. The old man and Kutoroge received us in a stately manner. We went into the front room, for the house has two, the _shem_ being, apparently, an old house, and squatted down in two facing lines—Mr. Batchelor, Manuel, and I, facing the clerk, the policeman, Kutoroge, Shutratek, Sangyea, and Santukno. We all went through the formal salutations of hand-rubbing, hand-waving, and beard-stroking. I then paid one month’s full salary in advance. The clerk drew up formal receipts, which were signed, sealed, and witnessed. The necessary data were taken down for securing legal applications for passports to leave the country. [Illustration: SANTUKNO.] All formalities having been thus observed, we were ready to leave. Money was supplied for securing the necessary equipment for the house at Saint Louis and for bringing all to the railroad and we told them when they must appear at Sapporo. In the morning, our only conveyances were two small-box, single-horse, two-wheeled carts. One of these we loaded full with our baggage. Into the other Manuel and I crowded ourselves, sitting on the board bottom, with our legs stretched stiffly crosswise of the cart. When Mr. Batchelor chose to ride, we all three adopted some sort of a kneeling or crouching position. Progress was slow and uncomfortable. Sometimes we stopped to make photographs, and on one such stop were able to test this statement in Mr. Batchelor’s book: “They cut the fat part of the legs of both males and females at the joint near the pelvis, and then bind the wound up with the leather-like layers of the fungus mycelium found between the bark and the wood of dead oak, elm, or ash trees.” I had been questioning him about this practice, raising a query as to its purpose and its generality. As we were passing through a village, we met a woman with a baby in her arms, and Mr. Batchelor inquired of her in regard to it. After a little hesitation, she showed me the baby, a little girl perhaps less than a year old. It had been cut only on the left side, back on the inside of the leg, just below the buttocks. The cut had healed, but the scar was quite plain. The woman said they do it with babies that kick and squirm too much. While the practice is probably not general it is certainly common and widespread, occurring in several, if not all, villages.