Some strange deity is helping the Chinese Government.  There is always something appropriate to write about.  Yesterday the Duke of Edinburgh died.  We were officially informed to that effect, after the King Humbert manner, and the condolences were great.  Yesterday, also, during the evening, shelling suddenly commenced and the cannon-mouths that have been leering at us from a distance in dull curiosity at their inactivity have barked themselves hoarsely to life again.  Thus, while diplomacy still continues, shrapnel and segment are plunging about.  At times it really seems as if the Chinese Government had succeeded in dividing us up into two distinct categories.  It has tried to save the diplomats from shells and bullets; since they remain with the others they must share their fate.

We listened to this cannonade with tightly pressed lips last night for an hour and more, and, lying low, watched the splinters fly; and then, just as the clamour appeared to be growing, it ceased as suddenly as it had commenced, and the uproarious trumpets, that we know so well, once more called off the attacking forces with their stentorian voices.  It seems as if an internecine warfare had begun outside our lines—­that the loosely jointed Chinese Government is also struggling with itself.  Thus legs and arms thrash around for a while and cause chaos; then the brain reasserts its sway, and the limbs become quieted and reposeful for a time.  Never will there be such a siege again.  I am beginning to understand something of all its vast complexity, to know that everybody is at once guilty and innocent, and that a strange deity decrees that it must be so....

For while we are beginning to be attacked fitfully, other strange things have been observed from the Tartar Wall.  There has been some fighting and shooting in the burned and ruined Ch’ien Men great street down below, and Chinese cavalry have been seen chasing and cutting down red-coated men.  A species of Communism may in the end rise from the ashes of the ruined capital, or a new dynasty be proclaimed, or nothing may happen at all, excepting that we shall die of starvation in a few weeks....

The native Christians in the Su wang-fu are already getting ravenous with hunger, and are robbing us of every scrap of food they can garner up.  Their provisioning has almost broken down, in spite of every effort, and the missionary committees and sub-committees charged with their feeding are beginning to discriminate, they say.  These vaunted committees cannot but be a failure except in those things which immediately concern the welfare of the committees themselves.  The feeble authority of headquarters, now that puny diplomacy has been so busy, has become more feeble than it was in the first days, and, like the Chinese Government, we, too, shall soon fall to pieces by an ungumming process.  Native children are now dying rapidly, and two weeks more will see a veritable famine.  The trees are even now all stripped of their leaves;