and quotations, rigid insistence on form and red tape and the letter thereof. Give a Japanese a rule and he knows no exception on his part, understands no variation therefrom on yours. For instance, every afternoon we went into the sea from that gangway, and Guy Scull diving from the railing of the upper deck and Richard Harding Davis diving for coins thrown from the same deck into the water (and getting them, too) created no little diversion for everybody on board. On the third afternoon, Davis, in his kimono and nothing else, was halted by the first officer at the gangway. The captain had found a transport rule to the effect that nobody should be allowed to go in bathing--the good reason being, of course, that some of several hundred soldiers in bathing might drown. Therefore, we eighteen men, though we were in a way the guests of the captain's Government--in spite of the fact that we were paying for our own meals--and though for this reason a distinction might have been made, the rule was there, and, like Japanese soldiers, we had to obey. It looked a trifle ominous. We were only ten hours' sail now from Port Arthur, and one morning we did get away just before sunrise. The start was mysterious, almost majestic at that hour. For three days those transports had lain around us--filled, I was told, with soldiers, and yet not one soldier had I seen. Blacker and more mysterious than ever they looked in that dark hour before dawn--only the first flush in the east showing sign of something human in the column of black smoke that was drifting from the funnel of each. It showed, too, a gray mass lying low on the water, and near a big black rock that jutted from the sea. That gray mass gave forth one unearthly shriek and that was all. Instantly thereafterward it floated slowly around that jutting rock; one by one the silent black ships moved ghostlike after it, and when the red sunburst came, that gave birth, I suppose, to the flag of Japan, all in single file were moving in a great circle out to sea--the prow of each ship turning toward one red star that looked down with impartial eyes where the brown children of the sun were in a death-struggle with the cubs of the Great White Bear. By noon there was great cheer. The Japanese word was good at last--we were bound for Port Arthur. The rocky shore of Manchuria was close at hand. A Japanese torpedo-boat slipped by, its nose plunging through every wave and playful as a dolphin, tossing green water and white foam back over its whole black length. A signal-station became visible on one gray peak, and then there was a thrill that took the soreness of five months from the hearts of eighteen men. The sullen thunder of a big gun moaned its way to us from Port Arthur. There was not a man who had not long dreamed of that grim easternmost symbol of Russian aggression, and each man knew that no matter what might happen on land, Port Arthur held place and would hold place for dramatic