He often left his post of observation on the battlement, and came down onto my necktie, which he called “the silk waterfall.” There he read what I wrote and gave me his opinion with a frankness that would have made me very angry if I hadn’t been so fond of him. Sometimes in the midst of a sentence I would hear his little voice shrieking: “Oh, what stupidity! What have you written? Throw it away. I can’t understand a word of it.” At this interruption I would stop writing and say: “What is that?” And he would go on: “Rub out that nonsense. I will tell you what to say, and you can put quotation marks.” “Don’t you want to sign it, too?” I asked, laughing. But I agreed to what he proposed, and was always satisfied with what he did. In the end I accepted his services absolutely. “Fiam,” I would sometimes say, “I am tired. I don’t feel like thinking. Tell me what to write.” And he would shout at me: “Lazy fellow, if I weren’t here what would you do? Well, just this once” ... and he would dictate page after page. Dear little Fiam, how good he was! [Illustration: Fiam Goes to the War] CHAPTER VIII FIAM GOES TO THE WAR Fiam had been with me about a month when I was ordered to go to the war. You know, this was just the time when a great war had broken out between Japan and another empire, and I was ordered to go out and describe what I saw there. While writing up the important events that sent two armies to the front I couldn’t stop to narrate the adventures of my little friend, and so I never put a word about Fiam in any of my writings. Besides, grown people are so incredulous! The war took place in a part of China called Manchuria. In order to get there you have first to travel by railroad to a seaport, then on a ship to China, then on horseback or afoot, crossing plains and mountains for about a hundred miles, and so to the field of battle. In telling his story Fiam had shown so much fear of war that I hadn’t dared to tell him where we were going. He fairly flooded me with questions. “Why do we travel so much?” he asked me one day in the train when I had put him up on my collar so that he could see the country out of the window. I made him look at it well so that he could give me a description of it, as, in fact, he did. “We are traveling to amuse ourselves,” I replied. “Beautiful amusement,” he grumbled, “to be carried by this monster spitting out smoke. It seems to me like going back to that great house where I was split up and cut to pieces. Look up there,” he added after a few moments. “What lovely country! See the roof of that temple through the trees, and that wonderful field of flowers. Let us stop here.” “We can’t.” “Why not, if we are traveling to amuse ourselves?” “Yes, but the amusement will come further on.”