Many of the villages were very snug and prosperous, and some of the Chinese farmhouses were very fine, being (although I am an Irishman who says it) superior to the average Connaught cabin. In some places I saw attached to a single house a clean courtyard, large enough to hold a regiment; spacious underground cellars for garden produce in winter, symmetrical piles of "kiaoliang," strings of vegetables drying outside, great quantities of beans and sauces, and stores of beautiful silk dresses, for the members of the family of both sexes on festive occasions.
Whenever we came to a village no violence was used in turning the people out of the houses which we had decided to occupy. They were simply told to go, and they went, — to a neighbour's house, taking all their warm clothing and cooking utensils along with them. Some of the more respectable of these houses had, pasted on the walls of the rooms, the most indecent pictures, by native artists, that I have ever seen in my life. They were really so bad that we felt it would be almost criminal to allow even our polygamous Buriat Cossacks to soil their minds by gazing on them. In others there were strange and unexpected tokens of Western civilisation. One such token was a number of rude pictures, representing a railway train, a factory,
filled with pig-tailed Celestials, and something that looked like an overhead street railway. In every village we found mugs made in Japan, although genuinely Western in style, and bearing representations of Japanese warships with hundreds of Japanese flags flying from them, and of gigantic porcelain factories labelled " Kobe, Japan."
In entering the larger towns we created somewhat of a sensation. At Da-hwang-dee, which is only about a day's march from Newchwang, the people did not know whether to laugh at us as missionaries or to run away from us as outlaws. I remember that we entered one largish town while a market was being held in it, and the effect which our sudden appearance had was magical. From the far end of the town we could see people hurrying from the scene with mules and donkeys laden with grain and provisions; those who remained behind stood in crowds on each side of the street, gazing at us with the appearance of people that had been suddenly petrified.
When we reached the centre of this town I gave the owner of a little street stall a Chinese twenty-cent piece for some of the small native cakes which he sold, whereupon he hastily offered me nearly his whole stock, while the bystanders audibly commented on the magnanimity of a person who, with twice a hundred armed men at his back, would consent to pay for anything.
I think that we could easily have got recruits if we wanted them, for at Shanlinze, not far from the railway, a young Chinese policeman, speaking about three words of Russian, came to offer his services as " boy " to any of us who wanted to employ him. None of us wanted him, but nevertheless he discarded his uniform and accompanied us for the next two days with his horse and rifle. The rifle was soon rendered useless, however, by one of the Cossacks, who extracted the lock; and this soldier of fortune was, later on, dropped unceremoniously en route, a suspicion that he was a spy having suddenly crossed our leader's mind. I believe myself that he was simply attracted by the blaze of martial glory which he saw pass through his native village in the shape of our humble selves, and I am afraid that he must have had a hard time of it afterwards, for if he escaped the Hunghuze, whom he professed to fear, he must have fallen into the hands of the Chinese authorities, who were doubtless aware of his desertion.
On December 23 I went to sleep as usual with all my clothes on, even to my cap and " polshubok," and at two o'clock next morning I was awakened and told that we were now about to set out on our march to Ta-ho-shan station on the Chinese railway. As we rode along, Colonel Plaoutine told me that the Chinese policeman who had enrolled himself in our band had brought him the cheerful information that this station was guarded by English soldiers. About the exact number of these soldiers he was uncertain. First he had said that there were one thousand men. Then he had considerately reduced the number to six. There was a delightful vagueness about this which prepared us for almost anything; but if there was only one English soldier there, I felt sure that he might fire a shot that would be " heard round the world."