We had a shock and a thrill to-day--Brill, Lewis, Davis, and I. It was noon, and while we sat on a low stone wall in a grassy grove, a few carts filled with wounded Japanese passed slowly by. In one cart sat a man in a red shirt, with a white handkerchief tied over his head and under his chin. Facing him was a bearded Japanese with a musket between his knees. The man in the red shirt wearily turned his face. It was young, smooth-shaven, and _white_. The thrill was that the man was the first Russian prisoner we had seen--the shock that among those yellow faces was a captive with a skin like ours. I couldn't help feeling pity and shame--pity for him and a shame for myself that I needn't explain. I wondered how I should have felt had I been in his place and suddenly found four white men staring at me. It's no use. Blood is thicker than water--or anything else--in the end. This is distinctly a human country--a country of cornfields, beans and potatoes, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, goats, and no freaks in tree-trunk, branch, or foliage. But I can't get over seeing a Chinaman in a cornfield. It is always a shock. He doesn't seem to have any right there--somehow nobody does except a white man or a darky. There are tumble-bugs in the dusty road and gray, flying grasshopper-like things that rise from the dust, flutter a few feet from the earth and drop back again, just as they do at home. And the dragon-flies--why, they are nothing in the world but the "snake-doctors" that I used to throw stones at when I was a boy in the Bluegrass. The mountains are treeless and volcanic, but it's a human country and I don't feel as far from home as I did in Japan. Brill says it all looks like a lot of Montana hills around Ohio cornfields: only the corn is millet that grows twelve feet high. The people eat the top, they feed the blades to live-stock, and the stalk serves almost every purpose of bamboo and for firewood as well. You can ride for hours between two solid walls of it, and you wonder how there can be people enough in the scattering villages to plant and till, or even to cut it. A richer land I never saw. It looks as though it would feed both armies, and yet there was no sign--no burned house or robbed field or even a cast-off bit of the soldier's equipment to show that an army had ever passed that way. One fact only spoke significantly of war. No woman--except a child or a crone--was ever visible. This struck me--when I recalled the trail of the Massachusetts volunteers from Siboney to Santiago and the thousands of women refugees straggling into Caney--as very remarkable. I suppose both Japanese and Russians are trying to keep the good-will of the Chinaman as well as of the rest of the world. I don't wonder that the Russians are fighting for that land, nor shall I wonder should the Japanese, if they win, try to keep it. But how it should belong to anybody but the Chinaman who has tilled it in peace and with no harm to anybody for