he passed.  I returned the greetings in dumb show, and hurried on.  I do not know how it would have fared with me in broad daylight; probably not nearly so well; but it was now nearly dark.  Most of the soldiers had provided themselves, to light the work of slaughter and pillage, with one of those coloured lanterns which are to be found in such profusion in Chinese towns, and their demoniac aspect was greatly heightened by the illuminations they carried as they flitted to and fro.  The butchery was proceeding without the least sign of abatement; shots, shouts, shrieks, and groans resounded on every side; the streets presented a fearful spectacle; the ground was saturated with blood, and everywhere strewn with horribly mutilated corpses; some of the narrower avenues were positively choked with carnage.  The dead were mostly the townspeople; their valiant defenders seemed to have been able to make themselves scarce; where they all got to is a mystery to me; perhaps owing to the fact that they got rid of their uniforms early in the proceedings in order not to be identified as combatants, a dodge that must have served them very little, as the conquerors killed everyone they came across.

At length I reached Sen’s house, only to find that the destroyer had been there.  The place was in darkness; I took down the lantern from over the outer gate, with the name of the inn and its proprietor’s written on it in the Chinese character, lit it, and began an inspection.  The first thing I saw was the corpse of my landlord himself, lying in the covered court.  His head was almost severed, and he had been disembowelled.  Most of the lower storey rooms had doors opening into this court; across the threshold of one lay the corpse of a female servant, mutilated in an unspeakable manner.  The household establishment consisted in all of some ten or twelve persons, and eight of them I found lying murdered in different parts of the premises.  There was no sign of living presence anywhere.  The place had been thoroughly ransacked, and everything worth having carried off.  My blood boiled as I surveyed the scene of desolation and massacre, where lately I had witnessed happiness and cheerful industry, and I felt that I could willingly have died myself on the spot to obtain vengeance on the murderers.

In one of the upper rooms there was a bamboo ladder and trap leading on the roof, which was flat, and it occurred to me to ascend and look round.  It was quite dark, and there was little to be seen beyond the limits of the street.  Distant illuminations marked the positions of the forts on the surrounding heights.  The seaward ones were still in possession of the Chinese.  They fell easily on the following day, and had been practically abandoned.  I noticed that the sounds of violence in the town were rapidly decreasing.  As I walked slowly round, the dim light of my lantern fell on two figures skulking in the shadow.  They retreated as I advanced, until