San Francisco, until an opportunity arose to send them, fat and happy, back to their own country.
A full account of the incident and of the refugees was published in one of the San Francisco papers. It fell into the hands of just one man who was capable of perceiving the momentous possibilities that lay in the occurrence. This man was a commodore in the United States navy; and his name was not Perry, as the reader may at first surmise, but John H. Aulick. He was a Virginian, then in his sixty-second year; he had had a long and very honorable service, and was keen and statesmanlike in his ideas.
What Commodore Aulick saw in the incident was this: The kind and friendly reception of the Japanese waifs in America, contrasted with the ordinary treatment of white refugees in Japan, might be taken advantage of to open friendly relations with Japan. To effect this result, a naval
