Here Villiers interrupted. “Men who, like the Russians, build trenches so they must show themselves on the skyline to shoot can’t teach tactics,” he said. The talk slid on to the bonzais, mutual promises to dine together next in Port Arthur, and au revoirs. But I started to write of the Manchurian. He knows not, neither does he learn. Yet you can scarcely ask who let down that shaggy jaw and who sloped that head away, for he has a magnificent, strong, clean jaw and his head is handsome and high. That he bathes only once a year and cares not who owns the land so long as he tills it; and that his wife and daughter sit on the stone fence of his donkey stable picking the lice from one another’s heads, doubtless has nothing to do with the question propounded by our sociological poet. Nor is the Manchurian uncivilized. He has, indeed, reached quite a state of development, for he is the abject slave of fashion--at least his wife and daughter are. They bandage their feet until where a No. 8 boot should go they wear baby 6’s. This, I dare say, is a less harmful fashion than that other silly one of corsets, for surely the organs beneath a shoe lace are not so vital as those under a waistband, but it looks sillier. To see women in the harvest fields, by the roadside washing clothing, cleaning the donkey stable, baking bread, spanking boys, suckling babies, attending husbands, all the time balancing themselves as a _première danseuse_ on her toes, is to think of stake and rack! They say that this is not real Manchuria, that up North, where the other army is, the women do not bind their feet. The present Dowager Empress of China, considered by many the most remarkable living woman, is a native of northern Manchuria. In all this vast country the women are noted for modesty and virtue. Ten years ago, during the China-Japan War, many committed suicide to escape expected ravishment. But it was well learned then that the Japanese never outrage a woman. An incident of such atrocity by Japanese, in either war, has yet to be recorded. It is said that the Russians are different, though it is difficult to see how any Westerner could look with more than curiosity on a Manchu woman. Certain it is that they go about their lives here in complete freedom and security. Not only do the Japanese respect women; they respect property also. Here is a fertile country with rich crops sustaining a vast army, yet no farmer has lost a bushel of grain, except when the chance of battle has substituted shot for scythe. [Illustration: ORPHANS Driven from home by shells which killed their father and mother, these brothers tramped from camp to camp selling eggs.]