In Japan you must take the advice of St. Paul and follow after patience. No country teaches the lesson so thoroughly. In Tokyo the patience of hope gave place to the patience of despair, yet we had promise of recompense. Captain Tanaka, the genial and inscrutable aide-de-camp of General Kodama, wrote to me these words: “The men of great patience will, I think, be crowned with an invaluable reward and unfathomable blessing by Heaven!” I was beginning to doubt if I should live long enough to wear that crown when the order came to march. Whither we were not told and did not stop to inquire, for Japanese generals, like soldiers of other countries, love to clothe in mystery their most obvious movements and prefer always to “drink tea by strategy.” It was enough that we were to proceed to Chemulpo and there await further commands. From Chemulpo we were ordered at once to Chianampo in the transport Suminoye Maru. At dawn on April 10th we approached the mouth of the Salee river and saw before us a glorious panorama of sea and shore. Gleaming like a sheet of steel the channel stretched away in the grey distance studded with brown bosses of islet and rock, like a huge buckler slung before the harbour. On the afternoon of April 12th, I left Chianampo with my interpreter, Mr. Ito, and proceeded to Pyng-yang where orders awaited us. Weather and hard usage had wiped out every trace of a track, and when my restive Chinese pony was not wallowing in mire he was doing a tight rope performance on a few inches of crumbling earth over the slimy depths of a paddy field. After many hours we came to Ayshin, a squalid hamlet of wattle walls in which lived and died the famous Chinese classic Kwantaishi, whose essays are known to every scholar in the East. Yongan was my resting place for the night. Here I was received by the pay-master of a regiment of the Guards--a banker and former member of the Japanese Parliament, who had quartered himself in the gaol, which was certainly cleaner than any house in the village. Next morning my host presented me with two sticks used for punishing criminals. They are of hard wood about an inch square, inscribed with Chinese characters denoting the number of strokes under which the unhappy offender often dies. I resumed my journey under dismal conditions, for rain had fallen in the night and a dense fog overhung the castle on the hill in which Kato and the early Japanese invaders of Korea were besieged and reduced to such straits that they ate the mud walls. [Illustration: In comfortable Quarters.] [Illustration: My Interpreter and Staff.]