The vessel which he placed at our disposal was a screw steamer of
about 2000 tons, long, low, and sharp; an exceedingly fast boat,
capable of doing her twenty knots an hour even when heavily laden, as,
in a desperate emergency, we were soon to find out. Articles signed,
our cargo was procured and shipped--cannon, rifles, revolvers,
cartridges, fuses, medicines, etc., etc. We cleared without
difficulty, weighed, stood out, and laid our course straight across
the North Pacific.

Our ship, the _Columbia_, proved a beauty, in every way fit for the
risky business we were engaged upon. Needless to say she had not only
been selected for speed, but was rendered in appearance as
unobtrusive as possible. Besides lying low in the water, she was
painted a dead grey, funnels and all. The sort of coal we used,
anthracite, burned with very little smoke, and even that little was
obviated, as we approached the seat of war, by a hood on the
smoke-stack. She slipped through the water silently and noiselessly as
one of its natural denizens, and on a dark night, with all lights out,
could hardly have been perceived, even at a short distance, from the
deck of another vessel.

Without the ship's log to refer to, I cannot be certain of dates and
distances, but it was in the latter days of August that we were
steaming up the Yellow Sea, where, by the way, the water is _bluer_
than I have ever seen it elsewhere. In some places it presents, on a
moonlit night, the appearance of liquefied ultramarine, though it
certainly is muddy enough about the coasts. Our destination was
Tientsin, one of the most northern of the treaty ports, and of course
we kept in with the Chinese mainland as closely as possible to avoid
the Japanese cruisers. All had gone well, and we were fast approaching