droves.  In one building there are alone four hundred native schoolgirls, rows upon rows of them that never seem to come to an end, sitting on the ground in their sober blue coats and trousers, peacefully combing each other’s hair, or working on sandbags with the imperturbability of the Easterner who is placid under death.  Farther on, again, you come on families, sometimes three generations huddling together on a six-foot straw mat.  A mother trying to feed a child from her half-dry breasts tells you quietly that it is no use, since the meagre fare she is already getting does not make sustenance enough for her, let alone her child.  Yet everything possible is being done to feed them.  All the able-bodied converts have long ago been drafted off for barricade-building and loophole-making in the endless walls, and here 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 Japanese takes his two hours on and his four hours off night and day without a murmur or without ever a break.  Only at one place are there more than three or four little men together.  At the eastern end of the Fu there is a big post grouped round the fortified Main Gate, where there are actually eight or nine men under the command of a Japanese naval lieutenant.