Allow us to take his photograph?--certainly he would, and stood up and put on a straight face purposely for the occasion, waving back a scout who hurriedly came in whilst I snapped a picture. Then he attended to the scouting parties, taking careful notes of all that they told him. I wished to exchange cards--delighted, he would do it in a moment, and wrote his full name on the back. He laughed over the simplest incident, was exceedingly solicitous on my behalf, assured me that they would win; when he spoke of battle his face hardened, his keen eyes sparkled, full of fire. His aide-de-camp, quite a youngster, dressed in a foreign tweed suit--queueless, of course--and bearing no traces whatever that he was an army official, gave us all the news he could. He waved his hands to the captured railroad trucks, containing the captured supplies, and asked us blandly if we could solve the problem of living without food--because he couldn't, and he didn't suppose that the Loyalists could. "And they won't," he vociferated. But that was in the early days of the war. During those days it was interesting to any fair-minded foreigner to watch the intensity of feeling displayed by the Revolutionary Army as opposed to the downhearted attitude of the small Imperial force which took the field. On the same morning that I interviewed the Revolutionary Commander of the Field Forces I was successful in discovering that General Chang Piao was on board a launch down-river. I immediately made off by launch {61} to see him. As I sat soon afterwards by the side of this Chang Piao, the man in all Hupeh who had been entrusted with the authority of the Model Army, and looked at a medium-sized Chinese who gave no evidence of being a common soldier by anything in his dress, and as I looked at his unshaven head and bloodshot eyes, I could not find it in my heart to extend to him anything but genuine pity. He recently had been a strong man, high in office, and dazzled with braid and buttons and all official paraphernalia which to-day is thought so much of in military China; now he was a crestfallen man, knowing that he had lost, cut off from all supplies, with a helpless army on his hands, and himself knowing that fifty thousand Chinese dollars were being offered for his head. With some little difficulty I had jumped on board, asked for Chang Daren, and was shown into the cabin aft, where I found some dozen or so officers eating their morning rice. Towards me came a man dressed in an ordinary teacher's garb; he extended his nervous hand, and with ceremony bade me enter. His name he told me was Chang--this, then, was the man, General Chang Piao, erstwhile Commander-in-Chief of the Hupeh Model Army.