It is not wise for a man who can get sea-sick in a rowboat on a mill-pond to attack a Japanese dinner just after a seventeen days’ voyage across the Pacific. I was just that unwise, and for that reason perhaps can do but scant justice in this Land of the Rising Sun, to a soup in which floats bits of strange fishes from the vasty deep, unknown green things and an island of yellow custard; to slices of many colored raw fish, tough cocks’ combs (real ones) or even to the stewed chicken which at this dinner at least had been shorn of everything except bones and tough sinews. The other day I tried it again with no better success, and now with the prospect of rice for food three times a day in the field around Port Arthur and no bread (there can be no more serious deprivation to a Southerner) I am suddenly asked to think of a Kentucky table and that turbaned mistress of the Blue Grass kitchen, a Kentucky cook
