Your Bannerman servant is now the medium of bringing in countless rumours which he barefacedly alleges are facts, and in impressing on you that everyone must certainly die unless we quickly act.  The three Roman Catholic Cathedrals of Peking, placed at three points of the compass, are almost strategic centres surrounded by whole lanes and districts of Catholics captured to the tenets of Christ, or that portion deemed sufficient for yellow men, in ages gone by.  Every household of these people during the past few weeks has seen fellow-religionists from the country places running in sorely distressed in body and mind, and but ill-equipped in money and means for this impromptu escape to the capital which everyone vainly hopes generally is to be a sanctuary.  The refugees, it is true, do not receive all the sympathy they expect, for the Peking Catholic being the oldest and most mature in the eighteen provinces of China, holds his head very high, and “new people”—­that is, those whose families have only been baptized, let us say, during the nineteenth century—­are somewhat disdained.  In a word, the Peking cathedrals and their Manchu and other adherents are the Blacks; and not even in papal Rome could this aristocracy in religion be excelled.  But although the newcomers are disdained, their news is not.  Everything they say is believed.  The servants, therefore, browsing rumours wherever they go, bring back a curious hotchpotch after each separate excursion.  Sometimes the balance swings this way, sometimes that; sometimes it is ominously black, sometimes only cloudy.  You never know what it will be ten minutes hence, and you must content yourself as best you can.  Your body-servant being a Bannerman (my particular one is a Manchu), and being reasonably young, is also a reservist of the Peking Field Force, and consorts with other Bannermen who may be actually on guard at one of the Palace gates.  Who passes in and who passes out of the Palace now spreads like wildfire round the whole city, for the success of the Boxers will depend upon the support the Peking Government intends to give them when the worst comes to the worst.  And the Peking Government is still fencing, because the Palace cannot make up its mind whether the time has really come when it must act.  This lack of decision is fatal.

Late in the afternoon it transpired that the Empress Dowager was not in the Imperial city at all, but out at the Summer Palace on the Wan-shou-shan—­the hills of ten thousand ages, as these are poetically called.  Tung Fu-hsiang, whose ruffianly Kansu braves were marched out of the Chinese city—­that is the outer ring of Peking—­two nights before the Legation Guards came in, is also with the Empress, for his cavalry banners, made of black and blue velvet, with blood-red characters splashed splendidly across them, have been seen planted at the foot of the hills.  Tung Fu-hsiang is an invincible one, who stamped out the Kansu rebellion a few years ago