I had to smile when I learned that he had done the night cafés of Paris, had contrasted English and French farce as represented by the Empire and the Folies-Bergère, and knew all about the Post Impressionists and the Futurists or Cubists. The latter he did not understand. “It is possible,” he said in his strange, sing-songy way, “that they represent some motives of constructive subconscious mind with which we are not any of us familiar yet. Electricity came to man in some such way as that. I do not know. I do not pretend to understand it.” At the extreme upper end of Lucerne where the boat stopped, we decided to get out and take the train back. He was curious to see the shrine or tomb of William Tell which was listed as being near here, but when he learned that it was two or three miles and that we would miss a fast train, he was willing to give it up. With a strange, old-world wisdom he commented on the political organization of Switzerland, saying that it struck him as strange that these Alpine fastnesses should ever have achieved an identity of their own. “They have always been separate communities until quite recently,” he said, “and I think that perhaps only railroads, tunnels, telegraph and telephone have made their complete union satisfactory now.” I marveled at the wisdom of this Oriental as I do at so many of them. They are so intensely matter-of-fact and practical. Their industry is uncanny. This man talked to me of Alpine botany as contrasted with that of some of the mountain regions of Japan and then we talked of Lincoln, Grant, Washington, Li Hung Chang and Richard Wagner. He suggested quite simply that it was probable that Germany’s only artistic outlet was music. I was glad to have the company of Major Myata for dinner that same evening, for nothing could have been duller than the very charming Louis Quinze dining-room filled with utterly conventional American and English visitors. Small, soldierly, erect, he made quite an impression as he entered with me. The Major had been in two battles of the Russian-Japanese War and had witnessed an attack somewhere one night after midnight in a snowstorm. Here at table as he proceeded to explain in his quiet way, by means of knives and forks, the arrangement of the lines and means of caring for the wounded, I saw the various diners studying him. He was a very forceful-looking person. Very. He told me of the manner in which the sanitary and surgical equipment and control of the Japanese army had been completely revolutionized since the date of the Japanese-Russian War and that now all the present equipment was new. “The great things in our army to-day,” he observed very quietly at one point, “are artillery and sanitation.” A fine combination! He left me at midnight, after several hours in various cafés. CHAPTER XLIII ENTERING GERMANY