and clerks worked to exhaustion, satisfying demands, hoping to placate the mob and avert the unthinkable results of a riot.  Countless soldiers swarmed the streets with fixed bayonets.  But the bloodless witch has no claim to one single heart-beat of loyalty from the unpaid wretches who wear the Imperial uniform; and when by simply tying a white handkerchief on their arms they go over in groups of hundreds to the Revolutionists, they are only repaying treachery in its own foul coin.

Though I hate to leave Jack even for an hour, I have to get out each day for some fresh air.  To-day it seemed to me, as I walked among the crowds, fantastic in the flickering flames of bonfires and incandescent light, that life had done its cruel worst to these people—­had written her bitterest tokens of suffering and woe in the deeply furrowed faces and sullenly hopeless eyes.

Earlier in the year thousands of farmers and small tradesmen had come in from the country to escape floods, famine and robber-bands.  Hundreds had sold their children for a dollar or so and for days lived on barks and leaves, as they staggered toward Peking for relief.

Now thousands more are rushing from the city to the hills or to the desert, fleeing from riot and war, the strong carrying the sick, the young the old—­each with a little bundle of household goods, all camping near the towering gates in the great city wall, ready to dash through when the keeper flings them open in the early morning.

And through it all the merciless execution of any suspect or undesirable goes merrily on.  Close by my carriage a cart passed.  In it were four wretched creatures with hands and feet bound and pigtails tied together.  They were on their way to a plot of crimson ground where hundreds part with their heads.  By the side of the cart ran a ten-year-old boy, his uplifted face distorted with agony of grief.  One of the prisoners was his father.

I watched the terrified masses till a man and woman of the respectable farmer class came by, with not enough rags on to hide their half-starved bodies.  Between them they carried on their shoulders a bamboo pole, from which was swung a square of matting.  On this, in rags, but clean, lay a mere skeleton of a baby with beseeching eyes turned to its mother; and from its lips came piteous little whines like a hunger-tortured kitten.  Tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks as she crooned and babbled to the child in a language only a tender mother knows, but in her eyes was the look of a soul crucified with helpless suffering.

I slipped all the money I had into the straw cradle and fled to our room.  Jack was asleep.  I got into my bed and covered up my head to shut out the horrors of the multitude that are hurting my own heart like an eternal toothache.