They discerned the Pacific from the Hankone mountains, boomed through big, strange towns to Kyoto; then Sasebo, the troop-ships, and the landing at a Korean base, where they learned with bitterness that a second siege of waiting had just begun. The world outside now was but a wordless buzzing of voices, as from a locked room. They were at Anju when the first brush happened at Chengju (a neat little rout of Cossacks). They were at Chengju when Kuroki occupied Wiju, regardless of the growling of the Bear. They were at Yongampho, in the last few hours of April, when Kuroki crossed the Yalu, ten miles northeast, and fought the first great battle, named after the river. Always it was this way--a day or two’s march behind the business-end of the army. It had been a dead delay in Tokyo; but it was a wait lively with aggravations now--the wisp of fragrant hay forever dangling in scent. An English military attaché arriving late from Seoul brought the word that the cables of the correspondents reached their papers from seven to fifteen days late; and then with lineaments of the text effaced by censorship--stale, egoless, costly messages. At this word one of the American scribes crumpled under the strain and went out into the Yellow Sea in a junk, a mad dream in his brain to meet the sea-god, Togo, face to face. Old Feeney, accustomed to discuss strategies with generals, was spurred to such a distemper that he cabled to be recalled. It is significant that his message was the first of the war to go through the Japanese censor untouched by the blue pencil. Aye, and when the silent red stream of wounded began to trickle back from the Yalu fight, it required a man to keep himself reined down to a fox-trot. It was color, war-color, this back-throw from the weltering fields. Even this stopped, and Kuroki seemed hung forever in the hills about Fengwangcheng. The civilians breathed hard those weeks, and lived in an atmosphere burned from human rage. Always excepting Trollope, the Blue Boar, who had a feeling for China. He studied the deep, rutty Chinese roads through the hills (back of the army), some of them worn into formidable ravines--eroded by bare human feet and the showers of centuries. There were strange little shrines and monasteries high in those grim hills, and Trollope filled a note-book with their names and history. There are strata of mystery under the cuticle of China of which the raw young mind of the white man can only conceive a tithe--and then only in the ecstasy of concentration. And what names he found--Road of the Purple Emperor; Spring of the Whispering Spirit; Cascade of the Humming-bird’s Wing; Cataract of the Sombre Clouds; Grotto of the Adulteress’ Death--not names of mere flowery choosing, but names made florid by the necessities of a people whose history is so long that a poetic glamour has fallen upon it. And the Blue Boar found much to eat of a weird flavory sort, and kept his poundage.