m to
the Manchuria Hotel, where instead of this wealth of corroborative detail
they found John Fox in bed. As Prior, the only one of us not in
New-Chwang, had the pass from Fukushima, permitting us to enter it, there
was no one to prove what either Lynch or Fox said, and the officer flew
into a passion and told Fox he would send both of them out of town on the
first train. Mr. Fox was annoyed at being pulled from his bed at three
in the morning to be told he was a Russian spy, so he said that there was
not a train fast enough to get him out of New-Chwang as quickly as he
wanted to go, or, for that matter, out of Japan and away from the
Japanese people. At this the officer, being a Yale graduate, and
speaking very pure English, told Mr. Fox to "shut up," and Mr. Fox being
a Harvard graduate, with an equally perfect command of English, pure and
undefiled, shook his fist in the face of the Japanese officer and told
him to "shut up yourself." Lynch, seeing the witness he had summoned for
the defence about to plunge into conflict with his captor, leaped
unhappily from foot to foot, and was heard diplomatically suggesting that
all hands should adjourn for ice and champagne.

"If I were a spy," demanded Fox, "do you suppose I would have ridden into
your town on a white horse and registered at your head-quarters and then
ordered four rooms at the principal hotel and accommodations for seven
servants, nine coolies, and nineteen animals? Is that the way a Russian
spy works? Does he go around with a brass band?"

The officer, unable to answer in kind this excellent reasoning, took a
mean advantage of his position by placing both John and Lynch under
arrest, and at the head of each bed a Japanese policeman to guard their
slumbers. The next morning Prior arrived with the pass, and from the
decks of the first out-bound English steamer Fox hurled through the
captain's brass speaking-trumpet our farewells to the Japanese, as
represented by the gun-boats in the harbor. Their officers, probably
thinking his remarks referred to floating mines, ran eagerly to the side.
But our ship's captain tumbled from the bridge, rescued his trumpet, and
begged Fox, until we were under the guns of a British man-of-war, to
issue no more farewell addresses. The next evening we passed into the
Gulf of Pe-chi-li, and saw above Port Arthur the great guns flashing in
the night, and the next day we anchored in the snug harbor of Chefoo.

I went at o