they could back no further, and then one of them fell on his knees before me, bowing his forehead on the roof with abject cries.  I held the lantern towards him, and to my astonishment recognized Chung.  He evidently did not know me, and no wonder, considering the manner in which I had rigged myself out.  He seemed half out of his wits with fear, and I had some difficulty in forcing the fact of my identity upon his conviction.  Then his delight was as great as his previous terror.  His companion was a stranger to him—­a man of exceedingly gentlemanly and prepossessing appearance, and clearly a person of condition, being, in fact, as I afterwards found, a mandarin.  His own residence had been sacked and his family murdered.  He and a brother had escaped into the street, were pursued, and his relative shot in running away.  Though with his left arm broken by a bullet, he had run into the inn.  When the soldiers entered it he and Chung got on to the roof, where none of the Japanese thought of looking for victims.  His broken arm was causing him considerable suffering, and having acquired during my knock-about life some rude knowledge of surgery, I put the fracture together, and made a sling with my neck-tie.

I explained my situation to Chung as well as I was able; he translated to his countryman, who knew no English, and we held a council as to future proceedings.  The work of slaughter had apparently been suspended; either the soldiers were tired of it or had been recalled.  The Japanese forces exceeded 20,000, and of these I do not think that more than one half, perhaps not one third, were engaged in this first evening’s work, which was only the opening scene of the massacre.  Masses of the troops had been placed to occupy the forts, and otherwise secure the conquest.  We thought it likely, as indeed was the case, that they would all withdraw to the camps outside as the night advanced, and we resolved to attempt to gain the water-side, and seek a last chance of escape, under cover of darkness.  We searched the place for food, but all we could find was a little bread, and a few prepared sweetmeat cakes.

An awful stillness, broken at times by ominous sounds, came over the town.  Lights flitted at times through its dark labyrinths, by whom borne it was impossible to perceive.  The presence of death, in its most fearful shapes, seemed palpable to the senses, and we, crouching in the gloom on the roof, to which as the safest place we had returned, had before our mental vision the mutilated bodies in the rooms close below us, with the ghastly probability, almost the certainty, that another hour or two would join us in their horrid fate.  To myself, the reckless, wasted past presented itself, in that situation of appalling terrors, in all its enormity.  There was I, after throwing away the high advantages of fortune and prosperity, a ruined and degraded man, about to meet an appropriate ending to such a career by a bloody death at the hands of some brutal soldier, in an unknown land, at the ends of the earth, where scarcely a human being knew a word of my native tongue.  If these pages should be read by any young man embarking without a thought of the future, in the flush of high spirits and inexperience, upon courses similar to mine, I hope he will take warning, and stop in time.