the curious Japanese passion for order and detail is shown on the
coats of the older men. The boss-shifts, each responsible for so many
men who have to accomplish a given amount of work in a specified time,
have big white labels with characters written squarely across them,
telling everyone clearly what they are. At a little table near by
writers, who have been carefully sorted out from this incongruous
gathering, are provided with brush and ink, and have been set to work
making up reports and lists of all the people. These are handed to a
Japanese Secretary of Legation, who has been evolved into an
engineer-in-chief and overseer of native labour, and thus at every
hour of the day the distribution of the barricaders is known. Amid
these crowds of native refugees, who number at least a couple of
thousand people, two or three Japanese occasionally wander to see that
all's well, and give the babies little things they have looted from
Prince Su's palace to play with. Content to be where they are and
assured that the European will not abandon them, these natives exhibit
in a strange manner that inexplicable thing--Faith. Poor people--they
little know! Is it always thus with faith?

So the Su wang-fu, which is but the northwestern part of our lines, is
now a city in itself, inhabited by the most unlikely people in the
world. Three days have sufficed to give it an entity of its own. The
nature of the defence and the fighting value of the Japanese as
compared to the Italians, are fitly illustrated by the distribution of
forces which little Colonel S---- has already made. The Italians hold
perhaps a hundred feet of the outer wall and one hillock of some
importance. The Japanese have at least a thousand feet of loopholed
and unloop-holed wall, and are quite ready to take another thousand if
some one would be kind enough to give it to them. In posts of three
and four men, distant sometimes hundreds of feet apart, the little