I cannot write any more.  I am too agitated to be entertaining.

I wrote Sada a revised version of Blue Beard that would turn that venerable gentleman gray, could he read it.  Uncle will be sure to.  I dare him to solve the puzzle of my fancy writing.  But I made Sada San know the Prince Red Head was coming to her rescue, if the engine did not break down.

Now there is nothing to do but wait and pray there are no weak spots in Billy’s backbone.

Cable just received.  William is on the wing!

PEKING, CHINA, February, 1912.

Well, here we still are, my convalescent Jack and I, bottled up in the middle of a revolution, and poor, helpless little Sada San calling to me across the waters.  Verily, these are strenuous days for this perplexed woman.

It is a tremendous sight to look out upon the incomprehensible saffron-hued masses that crowd the streets.  I no longer wonder at the color of the Yellow Sea.

But, Oh, Mate, if I could only make you see the gilded walled city, in which history of the ages is being laid in dust and ashes, while the power that made it is hastening down the back alley to a mountain nunnery for safety!  Peking is like a beautiful golden witch clothed in priceless garments of dusty yellow, girded with ropes of pearls.  Her eyes are of jade, and so fine is the powdered sand she sifts from her tapering fingers it turns the air to an amber haze; so potent its magic spell, it fascinates and enthralls, while it repels.

For all the centuries the witch has held the silken threads, which bound her millions of subjects, she has been deaf—­deaf to the cries of starvation, injustice and cruelty; heedless to devastation of life by her servants; smiling at piles of headless men; gloating over torture when it filled her treasure-house.

Ever cruel and heartless, now she is all a-tremble and sick with fear of the increasing power of the mighty young giant—­Revolution.  She sees from afar her numbered days.  She is crying for the mercy she never showed, begging for time she never granted.  She is a tottering despot, a dying tyrant, but still a beautiful golden witch.

We have not been here long but my soul has been sickened by the sights of the pitiless consequences of even the rumors of war all over the country and particularly in Peking.  If only the responsible ones could suffer.  But it is the poor, the innocent and the old who pay the price for the greed of the others.  In this, how akin the East is to the West!  The night we came there was a run on the banks caused by the report that Peking was to be looted and burned.  Crowds of men, women and even children, hollow-eyed and haggard, jammed the streets before the doors of the banks, pleading for their little all.  Some of them had as much as two dollars stored away!  But it was the twenty dimes that deferred slow starvation.  Banks kept open through the night.  Officials