In spite of the Sunday papers, and the interminable talk on board, the guide books and maps which had made Japan nauseous to me, I saw the land of the Rising Sun with just as much of a shock and thrill as I first saw the coast of Africa.

We forgot entirely we had been twenty days at sea and remembered only that we were ten miles from Japan, only as far as New Bedford is from Marion.

We are at anchor now, waiting to go in in the morning.

Were it not for war we could go in now but we must wait to be piloted over the sunken mines.

That and the flashlights moving from the cruisers ten miles away gave us our first idea of war.