I was informed by the aide-de-camp that the port had been visited only a day or two before by the British warship Crescent, the officers of which had landed for a short while.  Fate seemed resolved that I should have no chance of leaving the place without seeing in it something worth remembering, as I had no sooner returned to Sen’s inn, which I did on my release, than I was seized with a kind of aguish fever, the effect, no doubt, of the exposure I had recently undergone.  It was nothing serious, but caused a feeling of great lassitude and depression, and confined me indoors for some ten or twelve days.  I had the place almost to myself, as the approach of the Japanese armies had not been favourable to custom, and the usual course of travel to and from the north had been suspended.  Sen was anxious to learn from me whether I considered it advisable for residents and townspeople to leave the port.  I replied, as I sincerely thought, that the Japanese, if they succeeded in taking the place, would do no harm to non-combatants.  I was, however, fatally mistaken.

The inn was a place of two storeys—­few Chinese habitations have more.  Most of the rooms opened round a partially covered courtyard.  I had a good one in the upper storey, or the “top-side,” as it is expressed in “pidgin.”  There were no fireplaces; the apartments were chiefly warmed by charcoal in braziers.  Along one side of that which I occupied was a long low hollow bench, filled with hot air from a furnace.  This contrivance usually served me for a bed, for although they use bedsteads, there is nothing on them but an immense wadded quilt, in which you roll yourself up.  I transferred it to the hot-air holder, which made a far warmer and more comfortable couch.  I was waited on mostly by a lad named Chung, one of the professors of “pidgin.”  He was a native of Canton, had been in Hong Kong, and was well accustomed to Englishmen and their ways.  The fare was very tolerable—­poultry, pork, and various kinds of fish, but no beef, as the Chinaman deems it wrong to kill the animal that helps to till the ground.  Chung told me that in the south cats and dogs are fattened for food, which it occurred to me would be a distinct advantage in Port Arthur at that time, with a siege imminent, and a great abundance of those animals observable.  For drink I naturally had plenty of tea, though it is very washy stuff as made by the Chinese, who usually content themselves with putting the leaves in a cup and pouring hot water over them, flavouring the infusion with tiny bits of lemon.

As soon as I was sufficiently recovered to go out, I made an effort to find out whether there was any prospect of getting away from the place by sea, but soon found that this was hopeless to expect.  No foreign vessels were in the port, and the native ones were chiefly junks, the proprietors of which, as interpreted by Chung, whom I took with me, refused to venture out unless for such a sum as I could by no possibility procure.  There were no Chinese war-vessels in the harbour, and indeed they would have been of no use there.