The General fondled his tea, delicious in a lacquered cup; Giokuro it was, the best Japan grows, and bits of the leaf glittered in the bottom like particles of steel. The steam curled about his face. He lit a cigar, puffed vigorously, and smoke wreathed with steam. Through the haze his whiskers, twisted in a loose wisp, bobbed spasmodically as his pointed chin spat out the sentences. He pulled himself further together, tying his legs acrobatically, and made room in the great chair for still another general. I wondered if he would disappear entirely, wizard-like, in a cloud of smoke. Then I thought of that criminal condemned to capital punishment, executed in experiment by the tea expert, who drank and drank until he shriveled and shrunk to powdery fiber. Plainly Giokuro, Havana and hot baths had helped hard work in drying up this tiny great man. “We can’t tell what damage the big guns will do,” went on the aspirate voice out of the smoke. Gotoh was turning over the sentences now as fast as they came. “This is the first time in history that coast defense guns have battled with each other. We have brought ours from Japan. As the Russians cannot use theirs against our navy they have turned them landward.” “Why not against your navy?” “Because--” he quickly drew from a drawer a brass tube attached to a pot of India ink. Out of the tube he drew a brush and began sketching nervously on a piece of blotting paper. The brass tube was a yatate, the first one I have seen in the army. Generations before siege artillery Japanese warriors who took arrow holders from the enemy disgraced them by converting them into ink pots and brush holders, for to soil a thing with business in those days was to disgrace it. But merchants found the device a neat invention and made arrow holders in miniature. The idea spread and soon all the men of business in the empire carried yatates in their belts. The army discarded them in disgust. Now Kodama comes, oblivious of tradition, satisfying his caprice and comfort, and to his work, as a samurai of old, introduces the yatate. When he finds the samurai superstition concerning the gaining of eternal life by a soldier killed in battle of value in his chess game of war he cherishes the belief, but when the silly prejudice against business gets in his way he cuts acquaintance with the samurai. Quickly, under the yatate brush, there grew a sketch of Port Arthur and the peninsula--curves for the east and west harbor, a cross for the town, fuzz for Liaotishan, a loop for the Tiger’s Tail. Then from east to west of the Liaotung he drew a dotted line in a semicircle and paralleled it with another dotted line.