"A good deal of it is--because they don't know that they oughtn't to show it. He put us at once in the attitude of being spies. I can't imagine what he thought we were drawing." "We didn't have our badges on. He might have arrested us." "That would have been some diversion." The day has been warm, brilliant--the sky crystalline, deep, and flecked with streamers of wool. At sunset now the rain is sweeping the west like a giant broom, the rush of wind and river is indistinguishable, the silent magpies are flying about, but there is still a mighty peace within these walls. Back now to mud, flies, and fleas. It's 1 A.M. The fleas won't sleep, and for that reason I can't. Even the drone of school-children chanting Chinese classics--as our little mountaineers chant the alphabet in a "blab-school"--and the barking of dogs have ceased. Somewhere out in the darkness picket-fires are shining where the Sun-children and the White Cubs are soon to lock in a fierce embrace. I like this Manchurian land and I like the Chinaman. Both are human and the country is homelike--with its cornfields, horses, mules, cattle, and sheep and dogs. The striking difference is here, you see no women except very old ones or little girls. Here is the absence of that insistent plague--human manure--that disgusts the sensitive nose in Japan. The "fragrant summer-time" would have been a satire if it had been written in Japan. But there is no charm here as there is everywhere in Nature and Man in Japan. Besides the Chinese, here at least, are filthy in person and in their homes--the smell of the Chinaman is positively acrid--while the Japanese are beyond doubt the very cleanliest people in the world. I wish I could see for myself what they really are in battle. As far as I can make out at long distance, the Japanese army and the individual Japanese soldier seem the best in the world: the soldier for the reason that he cares no more for death than the average Occidental for an afternoon nap--the army for the reason that the Buschido spirit--feudal fealty--having been transferred from Daimio and Samurai to Colonel and General--gives it a discipline that seems perfect. Imagine an army without stragglers or camp-followers, in which one man is as good as another and all boast of but one thing--a willingness to die. It looks as though for the first time in history the fanatical spirit of the Mussulman who believed that he would step, at death, from the battle-field into Paradise, was directed by an acute and world-trained intelligence. As to the soldier, the pivotal point of effectiveness seems to be this: an Occidental and a Japanese quarrel, and they step outside to settle matters. The Occidental thinks not only of killing the Japanese, but of getting out alive. His energies are divided, his concentration of purpose suffers. The Japanese has no such division--he is concerned only with killing his opponent, and he doesn't seem to care whether or not he comes out alive or dead.