Having recognized with relief a pile of luggage going aboard--luggage
which I had carefully pasted with red, white, and blue labels crossed
by the letters "U.S.A.T.S." and _Buford_--I dismissed the negro,
grasped the dressing-bag with fervor, and mounted the gangway. To me
the occasion was momentous. I was going to see the world, and I was
one of an army of enthusiasts enlisted to instruct our little brown
brother, and to pass the torch of Occidental knowledge several degrees
east of the international date-line.

I asked the first person I met, who happened to be the third officer,
where I should go and what I should do. He told me to report at
the quartermaster's office at the end of the promenade deck. A
white-haired, taciturn gentleman in the uniform of a major, U.S.A.,
was occupying this apartment, together with a roly-poly clerk in a blue
uniform which seemed to be something between naval and military. When I
mentioned my name and showed my order for transportation, the senior
officer grunted inarticulately, and waved me in the direction of
his clerk, glaring at me meanwhile with an expression which combined
singularly the dissimilar effects of a gimlet and a plane. The rotund
junior contented himself with glancing suspiciously at the order and
sternly at me. As if reassured, however, by my plausible countenance,
he flipped over the pages of a ledger, told me the number of my
stateroom, and hunted up a packet of letters, which he delivered
with an acid reproof to me for not having reported before, saying
that the letters had been accumulating for ten days.

It is true that the _Buford_ had been scheduled to sail on the first
day of the month; but I had arrived a day or two before that date, only
to learn that the sailing date had been postponed to the tenth. I had