the Minster, go down in company with the gaunt-looking Spanish doyen, vowing vengeance and declaiming loudly that if they were stopped everybody must be stopped too.  There must be no favouring; that they would not have.  I understood, then, why the mountain guns had come so quickly into action; they were gaining time for that exhausted colonial infantry to get round to some convenient spot and begin a separate attack.  It was each one for himself.

Somehow I understood now that it was a useless time for ceremony, and that one must act just as one wished.  So, finding some ponies tethered to a post below, without a word I mounted one and rode rapidly back to the Palace.  For an instant, as I passed the great Ch’ien Men Gate, I could see Indian troops filing out in their hundreds, and forcing a path through the press of incoming transport and guns.  Evidently the British commanders considered that the thing was over; that it was no use going on.  Already they had had enough of our Peking methods....

I must have ridden nearly a mile straight through the vast enclosures of the Palace, past lines and lines of American infantry lying on the ground, with the reserve artillery trains halted under cover of high walls, before I saw ahead of me a set of gates which were still unbroken.  General firing had quite ceased now, and excepting for an occasional shot coming from some distant corner, there was no sound.  The bulk of the American infantry had not even been advanced as far as I had come.  A skirmishing line, evidently formed only a short time before my arrival, was still lying on the ground; but the men were laughing and smoking, and the officers had withdrawn out of the heat of the sun into a side building, where they were examining a map.  The scaling-ladders were left behind.  I was soon told that orders had come direct from headquarters to stop the attack absolutely, and not to advance an inch further on any consideration.  The inner courts of the Palace and the residences of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager could not be approached until concerted action had been taken up by all the Allies.  I laughed—­it was the hydra-headed diplomacy of Peking raising its head defiantly less than eighteen hours after the first soldiers had rushed in....

The massive set of gates in front of me were those just without a most beautiful marble courtyard.  That I knew from the rude Chinese maps of the Forbidden City which are everywhere sold; if this boundary were passed the Imperial Palaces, with all their treasures, would be reached.  I thought, with my mouth watering a little, although I had no actual desire for riches, of General Montauban, created Comte de Palikao, because in the 1860 expedition, when the famous Summer Palace was so ruthlessly sacked, he had taken all the most splendid black pearls he could find and had carried them back to the Empress Eugenie as a little offering.  If one could only get past this boundary and the protocol had not stepped in!