I had a long talk with Kizlitzki this afternoon. He is like a round peg in a square hole in this army. Strict discipline and impeccable order seem to him the first essentials of military life. The others don’t understand this, although they are conscientious; but they like doing things in their own way, which is a happy-go-lucky way, and they think Kizlitzki is rather mad. Kizlitzki told me that at the battle of Ta-shichiae, where he was in command of the battery, when he had made all the necessary arrangements, placed his guns, &c., he received orders to go and speak to a general; before he went, he warned his subordinates to leave everything as it was. When he came back he found that the battery, owing to the fancy of one of the subordinates, had been moved two miles from where he had placed it. So he had to fetch it back and arrange everything over again. The result was that it did not open fire until two in the afternoon, a fact which I had noticed at the time, although I was not with the battery then. He said he had never made such an effort of self-control as not to lose his temper when he saw what had been done. In the French or German, and I trust also in our army, Kizlitzki’s methods would be taken as a matter of course. Here they are considered to be an unnecessary pose. On the other hand he is not in the least a formalist, a lover of red-tape, or a pedant; he merely considers elementary discipline to be necessary. I had tea with a Chinese Mandarin. I do not know which was the more exquisite, his tea or his manners. In the evening we discussed writers of books. Hliebnikoff said he knew who was the greatest writer in the world, and when some one else asked who, he answered Dostoievski of course. The doctor vehemently disagreed with this. Hliebnikoff went out of the room in disgust. It is astonishing what a quantity of English novels these people have read in translations: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Rider Haggard, Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome. The doctor admires Jerome enormously. I think there is a human element in him which especially appeals to Russians. _September 21st._ A fine, hot, and glorious September day. The evening was one of those things that linger in one’s mind like music. The sky was a very faint mauve, something between mauve and pink, like a hydrangea, or as Dante says:— “Men che di rose e più che di viole Colore aprendo,”