After the collapse of the rumor regarding the landing of the Japanese in force on the shores of the Gulf of Pechili, which obtained credence for nearly a fortnight in the Far East, fluttered every Cabinet in Europe, forced even so cool and well-informed a man as Sir Robert Hart into hasty action, and produced a hurried exodus of Europeans from Peking and a scare generally among the foreign residents in North China, I returned from Peking to Chefoo to await the course of events. The war, its requirements, and its uncertainties disarranged the means of ocean transit so effectually that, after hanging on for some weeks, in the midst of daily rumors of great naval engagements, for a steamer for Wladivostok, I only succeeded in getting a passage in a small German boat which reluctantly carried one passenger, and in which I spent a very comfortless five days, in stormy weather, varied by the pleasant interlude of a day at Nagasaki, then in the full glory of the chrysanthemum season, and aflame with scarlet maples. Lighted, cleaned, and policed to perfection, without a hole or a heap, this trim city of dwarfs and dolls contrasts agreeably with the filth, squalor, loathsomeness, and general abominableness which are found in nearly all Chinese cities outside the foreign settlements. Chinese moved about the streets with an air as of a ruling race, and worked at their trades and pursued the important calling of _compradores_ with perfect freedom from annoyance, the only formality required of them being registration; while from China all the Japanese had fled by the desire of their consuls, not always unmolested in person and property, and any stray “dwarf” then found in a Chinese city would have been all but certain to lose his life. The enthusiasm for the war was still at a white heat. Gifts in money and kind fell in a continual shower on the Nagasaki authorities, nothing was talked of but military successes, and a theatre holding 3,000 was giving the profits of two daily performances to crowded audiences in aid of the War Fund. The fact that ships were only allowed to enter the port by daylight, and were then piloted by a Government steam-launch in charge of a “torpedo pilot,” was the only indication in the harbor of an exceptional state of things. It was warm autumn weather at Nagasaki, but when I reached Wladivostok the hills which surround its superb harbor were powdered with the first snows of winter, and a snowstorm two days later covered the country to a depth of 18 inches. Wooded islands, wooded bays, wooded hills, deep sheltered channels and inlets, wooded to the water’s edge, bewilder a stranger, then comes Fort Godobin, and by a sharp turn the harbor is entered, one of the finest in the world, two and a half miles long by nearly one wide, with deep water everywhere, so deep that ships drawing 25 feet lie within a stone’s throw of the wharves, and moor at the Government pier.