"Oh, Nishpa," he replied with an air of contempt, "I am very clean, and have never needed washing!"
If Kushiro is not interesting to an artist, it is decidedly so from an archæological point of view. Numerous pits, forts, and camps, flint implements, and fragments of pottery, are found in the immediate neighbourhood of the town, both on the range of hills and along the west shore of Lake Harutori. The pits are found in such numbers as to lead one to believe that the old "Kossuri" of the Ainu was once the capital of a race of pit-dwellers previous to the conquest of the whole of Yezo by the hairy race. The Ainu gave these people the name of Koro-pok-kuru—men of the holes. A few words on them may not be out of place, though, unfortunately, little is to be learned from the Ainu as to who their predecessors were, and it is merely by a close examination of their pits, and relics found in different parts of Yezo and the Kuriles, that we can to a certain extent trace the existence of such a race of people, and also prove that they were in no way connected with the present Ainu.
AINU HOOK FOR SMOKING BEAR-MEAT.
KORO-POK-KURU FORT.
CHAPTER IX.
The Koro-pok-kuru, or Pit-dwellers.
All over Yezo and the Kurile Islands remains of an extinct race of pit-dwellers are to be seen. It is especially near lakes and swamps or along the coast that rectangular, circular, and elliptical pits are numerous, but square pits are not so common. None of these pits have yet been discovered on the main island of Nippon, but many are still to be found as far south as Hakodate, in Yezo. On the east and north-east side of the peak, at the latter port, these pits, flint implements, and rude pottery, mostly in fragments, are met with in great abundance. The implements consist mostly of arrow-heads, stone adzes,