I wonder whether they were crooking the pregnant hinges of the knee or what on earth it did mean. We were hung up here at 3 P.M., and allowed to go no farther. There is no order for us to remain--only a "strong desire" that we should--which is the Japanese way. Davis and I had a great bath to-day in a pool which somebody had dammed up--for what purpose I know not. What I do know is that it was not meant for us. ... Sitting on the sand, we are this August 5th under birch saplings and by the side of a running stream. Davis and Lewis are asleep in the sand. Fifteen miles only is our _métier_ to-day and Brill is anxious to go on. The roads are bad farther on, say the Japanese, and transportation difficult: the only satisfactory reason yet given for this hideous delay, and this, I'm afraid, not the true one. They simply don't trust us--that's all. The body of the dragon is naturally getting bigger and his vertebræ are distinctly more lumpy. For instance, he gathered in a train of thirty freight-cars this morning and he had six hundred coolies pulling it for him. The button of him dropped back to-day toward the tip o' tail that is his anatomical place. Brill passed him on the road. His bicycle-tire was punctured and he was trying to mend it, Brill says, with 25-cent postage-stamps. He evidently succeeded, for he has just arrived. He seems to have had a high old time on the way. At the last Chinese village he halted long enough to offer a prize--what I don't know--to the Chinese child that could display the prettiest embroidered stomacher. He had them lined up in a shy, smiling row, and was about to deliver the prize when the winner was suddenly thrust forward with a wonderful piece on his chubby tum-tum. The wild Irishman gave him the prize, hoisted him on the bicycle and circled the compound swiftly to the delight of the village. I asked him how he communicated with these isolated heathens and he said he talked Irish to them. I'm quite sure he does and he seems to make himself understood. It's sunset now at North Wa-fang-tien and all of us are out in a hard-packed, sand-floor yard under little birch trees. It was a hot ride to-day--the last mile being over a glaring white road and through glaring white sand. That glare of a fierce sun made the head ache and the very eyeballs burn. I almost reeled from Fuji, who for that mile was, for the first time, almost docile.