"You English are our allies. We are in trouble, and we may draw you as allies into it. We, therefore, grant your right to know how we behave on the battle-field, where we may possibly have to fight, shoulder to shoulder. Therefore, you English correspondents, you English attachés, can go to the front, the rest of you cannot." Nothing in all this could have given offence. All or any of it would have had at least the combined merits of frankness, consideration, honesty, and it is very hard for this Saxon to understand how any or all could possibly have any bearing on anybody's advantage or disadvantage, as far as this war is concerned. The Japanese gave no open hint of unwillingness to have us go--no hint that we were not to go very soon. We were urged to get passes for ourselves, interpreters and servants at once. Most of the men obeyed at once, bought horses, outfits, provisions and wrote farewell letters--wrote them many times. This was the middle of March. Ever since we have stayed at the Imperial Tomb in Tokio--the Imperial Hotel is the name it calls itself--under heavy expense to ourselves here and to the dear ones at home who sent us here; unable to go away; told every ten days that in the next ten days we would most likely go, and told on no day that within the next ten we should not go. Now it was soon--"very soon"--in English, and then it was "tadaima"--in Japanese. Tadaima! That, too, meant "soon," when I first put stumbling feet on the tortuous path of Japanese thought and speech. The unwary stranger will be told to-day that it does mean "soon," and as such in dictionaries he shall find it. But I have tracked "tadaima" to its lair and dragged it, naked and ashamed, into the white light of truth. And I know "tadaima" at any time refers only to the season next to come. Early in March, for instance, it means literally--"next summer about two o'clock." All this was something of a strain in the way of expectation, disappointment, worry, wasted energy--idleness. And so with a worried conscience over the expense to the above-mentioned dear ones at home, and the hope that some return might yet be made to them; through a good deal of weakness and a good deal of reluctance to go home and get "guyed," we stayed on and on. In May came the battle of Nanshan and the advance on Port Arthur. In June followed Tehlitzu. Both battles any man would have gladly risked his life to see, and I really think it would have been well for the Japanese, granting their accounts of the two battles as accurate--Russian atrocities in one, undoubted Japanese gallantry in both--if impartial observers had been there to confirm. As it stands, the Japanese say "you did"--the Russians say "we didn't"--and there the matter will end.