September 21st.
A fine, hot, and glorious September day. The evening was one of those things that linger in one’s mind like music. The sky was a very faint mauve, something between mauve and pink, like a hydrangea, or as Dante says:—
“Men che di rose e più che di viole
Colore aprendo,”
and, hanging over the delicate willow-trees, silvery in the half-light and faintly rustling, a large and misty moon—a moon made of ghostly fire. The days pass in pleasant monotony; visitors come from other divisions; but we go to bed about nine in the evening and get up very early. It is a delicious life. We often visit the Chinese professor in his peripatetic school. One of the students asked me whether in my country “you write and a big captain comes to look-see, and if all was not well, beats you.” I said that practically this was the procedure of our competitive examinations.
September 27th.
Autumn has come and it is too cold now for the men to be encamped here out of doors, so we have moved into quarters in the town.
October 1st.
I left for Gunchuling, en route for Kharbin, with Hliebnikoff and another, and bade goodbye to the friends who had so hospitably entertained me. (Two of them I was never to see again, for they died shortly after I left, one of typhoid and one of dysentery.) We arrived at Oushitai at five in the evening. The country is said to be infested by Hung-Hutzes, and some men were wounded by them yesterday in the environs of this place. At Jen-tzen-tung I met a merchant, whom I had known at Liaoyang, who had been caught by the Hung-Hutzes, but—
“As no one present seemed to know