Upon going below to dinner that night, a glance round the saloon tables showed that at least seventy-five per cent, of the passengers were Japanese, while, of the remainder, half, perhaps, were English, the rest being composed, in pretty nearly equal proportions, of French, Germans, and, somewhat to my surprise, Russians. These last, however, it eventually transpired, had booked only as far as Hong Kong, from whence it was probable that they intended to proceed to Port Arthur, although they said nothing to that effect. We passed through the Straits of Bonifacio and Messina, and in due course arrived at Port Said without incident, except that, thanks to Nakamura, I soon became upon friendly and even intimate terms with all the Japanese passengers in the saloon, as well as the ship's officers. There was one old gentleman in particular, rejoicing in the name of Matsudaira Hashimoto, an ex-professor of languages at the Imperial College of Tokio, who, happening to hear that I was anxious to utilise the large amount of time occupied by the voyage in acquiring as much knowledge as possible of the Japanese language, at once came forward with an offer to gratuitously teach me, in order that, as he remarked, I might be equipped with a working knowledge of the language upon my arrival, and so be in a position to immediately render my services valuable. The old gentleman, it appeared, had been remarkably successful in his day as a teacher of languages, working upon a system which he had himself invented; and, luckily for me, his system was so excellent that, working with me for five hours daily, he actually succeeded in redeeming his promise so thoroughly that when we at length reached Yokohama I was able to manage quite fairly well without the services of an interpreter. This by the way. It was a part of the skipper's plan to replenish his bunkers at Port Said, an operation involving a detention of three hours. We therefore all went ashore, and I posted a letter to my friends, the Gordons, attaching to it a number of stamps of different denominations, for the benefit of Ronald, who was an enthusiastic collector. We then roved about the town, but, finding nothing to interest us, soon returned to the ship, which we found enveloped in a cloud of coal dust which was playing havoc with her fresh white paint, despite the canvas screens spread to protect it.