Mounted on a coal black horse in full dress uniform, with half a dozen of his staff about him, sat old Ichinohe, a tall, gaunt man nearing sixty, whose life typifies the ideal of Japanese chivalry. Spartan in his simplicity and endurance, fearless as a lion in battle, and gentle as a woman in time of peace, we had known him almost since the war started. At Port Arthur he had commanded the Sixth Brigade of the Ninth Division, which, more than any other, had borne the heat and burden of the day. We had known him then, when sword in hand he had led in person his brigade against one of the most impregnable redoubts on the crest of that all but unconquerable fortress. Twice his column had been thrown back shattered and bleeding, but on the third assault, and just as the light of day was breaking in the East, this redoubtable man covered with blood and powder, and with his broken sword clutched in his hand, placed the Sun Flag on a position that the Russians had regarded as beyond possibility of capture. It was impossible to realize that this kindly old gentleman, who spoke so gently to us that morning in distant Manchuria, was the desperate commander who had been decorated by the Mikado for his invincible attack on the famous redoubt before Port Arthur’s bloody trenches. He met us with that smile which we had come to know and love, and bade his interpreter tell us that he and his staff would ride with us out of the town and see us started on our journey. So, with the staff riding about us, with clatter of saber and ring of spur, we rode through the old winding stonewall flanked street of Fakumen to the main gate of the town. Here the road winds out over a bridge that crosses the little river that wends its way down from the pass in the mountains three miles beyond and through which led our way that morning. The sun had just risen and its first copper-colored rays turned the dew on the grass to drops of brilliants. Away and away stretched the Oriental landscape with the hills standing out in the background in the clear, crisp air of early autumn. Behind us lay the town which had been our home since May, its strange, fantastic Chinese temples and maze of jumbled dwellings just catching the early sunlight; the whole scene might have been a setting snatched from the banks of the Jordan in the far away Holy Land. As we rode out of the gate and onto the old wooden bridge with its stone parapets the full strength of the Third Army Corps Military band blazed out the first notes of Sousa’s “The Stars and the Stripes,” and with the glorious swing of that martial strain taken up by drum and trumpet we crossed the river. None who has never lived for months in an alien land among a people of a different race can ever realize the throb of the heart that such music inspires. To us, in far off Mongolia, it sounded like a voice from our very own, coming across the wide Pacific.