I had scarcely finished my belated meal and been attended to by the surgeon, when the door of the ward was thrown open, and in rushed my former lieutenant, Ito, now captain of the destroyer _Akatsuki_. He had volunteered for service on the 2nd, it appeared, and upon his return had encountered the _Idzumi's_ Number 1, who had related to Ito my adventure aboard the junk, and the good fellow had straightway come to the hospital to see me "and pay his respects." Also, I shrewdly suspected, to spin me the yarn of his own adventures. But he insisted upon hearing my story first; and when I had told it, in the fewest words possible, he told me his own, which, stripped of his somewhat peculiar modes of expression, ran somewhat as follows: "Two days ago," he began, "the news reached here that our soldiers had crossed the river Yalu; and thereupon the Admiral made up his mind that the moment had arrived for a further attempt to be made to seal up the Russian fleet in Port Arthur harbour. "As you are aware, Togo has for some time been quietly making preparations for this attempt, the twelve steamers that have been lying at anchor here having been provided especially for that purpose. You know also that of those twelve, eight have been prepared in the usual manner, by placing heavy charges of gun-cotton in their bottoms, connected with the bridge by electric wires, so that the officer in command might be able to explode the charges and sink his ship at the proper moment, while, on top of these charges, the hull of the ship was converted into a solid rock-like mass by filling her with concrete made of stone, old railway metals and other iron, and cement. Five of the ships were also fitted with searchlights, so that we might not again have to contend with the difficulty of finding the harbour entrance. "Commander Hayashi, whom I believe you know, was appointed to command the expedition; and volunteers were called for in the usual way. Of course I offered myself; and Togo was good enough to appoint me to the _Totomi Maru_, a small craft of some nineteen hundred tons, under a splendid fellow named Honda. "We left here at noon of the 2nd, escorted by the gunboats _Akagi_ and _Chokai_, the second, third, fourth, and fifth destroyer divisions, and the ninth, tenth, and fourteenth torpedo-boat flotillas.