berth, with her
bow almost completely submerged. This was the last straw, so far as the
_Sevastopol_ was concerned, and she was practically put out of action
for the remainder of the war.

A week later our cruisers and destroyers effected a _coup_ which, there
is every reason to believe, must have materially hastened the fall of
the fortress. This consisted in the capture, off Round Island, of a
great fleet of Chinese junks, bound from Wei-hai-wei to Port Arthur,
conveying to the beleaguered city vast quantities of food, clothing,
ammunition, explosives, and supplies of every imaginable description.
The junks were taken into Dalny, where their cargoes were declared to be
contraband of war, and confiscated by the Japanese.

These several successes, comparatively unimportant though they were,
coupled with the practical destruction of the Port Arthur and
Vladivostock fleets, put new heart into the Japanese for a time; but
with the arrival and passage of the month of September, during which no
appreciable progress was made in the operations before Port Arthur, even
the unexampled patience and superb stoicism thus far displayed by the
Japanese as a people showed signs of the wear and tear to which they had
so long been subjected, and murmurings at General Nogi's apparent
non-success began to make themselves heard. The casualty lists seemed
to grow ever longer with the passage of the days, without any visible
result, except that Nogi contrived to retain possession of the few
unimportant positions which he had gained, and a black cloud of
pessimism seemed to be settling down upon the Island Empire.

Meanwhile, however, in its silent, secret, undemonstrative way, the
Japanese army had been making preparations of an important character,
among which were included the construction of concrete emplacements for
eighteen 11-inch howitzers, from which great things were expected. They
fired a 500-pound projectile charged with high explosive, and had a
range which enabled them to command the entire area of the fortress,
including the harbour.

On the 1st October the first six of these howitzers opened fire, in the
presence of General Baron Kodama, who had crossed to Port Arthur from
Japan to administer, perhaps, a fillip to the officers and the army
generally. North Kikwan fort was the first recipient of the new guns'
delicate attentions, one hundred shells being poured into it. Huge
clouds of dust and smoke at once arose from