December 24th.—­My letter telling Yeh that I had handed the affair over to the naval and military commanders, and Gros’s to the same effect, were sent to him to-day; also a joint letter from the commanders, giving him forty-eight hours to deliver over the city, at the expiry of which time, if he does not do so, it will be attacked.  I postponed the delivery of these letters till to-day, that the expiry of the forty-eight hours might not fall on Christmas Day.  Now I hear that the commanders will not be ready till Monday, which the Calendar tells me is ‘the Massacre of the Innocents!’ If we can take the city without much massacre, I shall think the job a good one, because no doubt the relations of the Cantonese with the foreign population were very unsatisfactory, and a settlement was sooner or later inevitable.  But nothing could be more contemptible than the origin of our existing quarrel.  We moved this evening to the Barrier Forts, within about two miles of Canton, and very near the place where the troops are to land for the attack on the city.  I have been taking walks on shore the last two or three days on a little island called Dane’s Island, formed of barren hills, with little patches of soil between them and on their flanks, cultivated in terraces by the industrious Chinese.  The people seemed very poor and miserable, suffering, I fear, from this horrid war.  The French Admiral sent on shore to Whampoa some casks of damaged biscuit the other day, and there was such a rush for it, that some people were, I believe, drowned.  The head man came afterwards to the officer, expressed much gratitude for the gift, but said that if it was repeated, he begged notice might be given to him, that he might make arrangements to prevent such disorder.  The ships are surrounded by boats filled chiefly by women, who pick up orange-peel and offal, and everything that is thrown overboard.  One of the gunboats got ashore yesterday, within a stone’s-throw of the town of Canton, and the officer had the coolness to call on a crowd of Chinese, who were on the quays, to pull her off, which they at once did!  Fancy having to fight such people!

Christmas Day.—­Who would have thought, when we were spending that cold snowy Christmas Day last year at Howick, that this day would find us separated by almost as great a distance as is possible on the surface of our globe! and that I should be anchored, as I now am, within two miles of a great city, doomed, I fear, to destruction, from the folly of its own rulers and the vanity and levity of ours.  We have moved a little farther up the river this morning, and as we are, like St. Paul, dropping an anchor from the stern, I have had over my head for several hours the incessant dancing about and clanking of a ponderous chain-cable, till my brains are nearly all shaken out of their place.

December 26th.—­I have a second letter from Yeh, which is even more twaddling