blood which seemed to flow from behind the door.  I pushed it open, and entered the place to which it gave access.  It seemed to be a kind of public office—­a wide, low, bare apartment, divided on one side by a massive wooden counter, surmounted by a partition pierced at intervals with pigeon-holes, as if for communication between persons on opposite sides of the division.  It may have been a bank or money-changer’s office.  It is not, however, on account of the place itself, but of its contents, that I describe it.  The floor was covered with the corpses of men, women, and children, mingled indiscriminately together, fugitives who had there taken refuge and been relentlessly butchered.  The bodies had been decapitated, and the bloody heads stuck up on a long row of spikes which surmounted the wooden partition over the counter.  Both Chung and the mandarin uttered a cry of terror as we caught sight of those distorted countenances, grinning upon us with the livid stare of violent death through the dim medium of the coloured lamplight.  My blood seemed to freeze as my eyes encountered that ghastly gaze of the dead, to which the upright position of the heads gave a sort of semblance or mockery of life.  An infant a few months old was pinned to the counter below by a sharp piece of iron run through its little body.  The floor was two or three inches deep in thickening blood and the entrails of the mutilated bodies.  The arms and legs as well as heads had been hacked off some of them and flung about the place.  Altogether a more hideous and revolting spectacle than this chamber of horrors can never have been presented to mortal gaze.  Such a scene, and the sickening smell of blood, drove us out again almost immediately.  At that moment another party of the Japanese passed our hiding-place.  An infantry soldier in advance carried a large uncovered flambeau, which threw a broad, red, steady glare over all surrounding objects.  I at once saw that these were all officers, excepting two or three; smart, well-got-up, gentlemanly-looking little men in the extreme; returning, perhaps, from calling off the last of their bloody war-dogs, or making sure that all resistance had ceased.  They were laughing and chatting gaily, as if the massacre were rather a pleasant affair than otherwise.  When they had gone by, we issued into the street, but had proceeded only a few paces when we saw a man carrying a lantern appear round the abrupt bend before mentioned.  He looked like another Japanese hurrying after his companions who had just passed.  We returned with all haste to the doorway; and as we judged that he had probably seen us, we re-entered the inner slaughter-house and closed the door.  We were right in thinking we had been seen, and in about a minute we heard steps outside the door, which was presently thrust violently open and the soldier entered, a low, sinister figure, holding a drawn sword in what seemed to me a curiously white hand.  He peered into the obscurity, perceived me, and doubtless taking me,