It was he who had again and again volunteered to play the part of executioner to all the wretched coolies engaged in sapping under our lines who had been captured from time to time, and whose heads had at once paid the last penalty.  This man had done it always with a shot-gun, and he had seemed to gloat over it; and in the end people had taken a detestation for him, and looked upon him for some strange reason as a little unclean.  Now he was madly excited, and as soon as he saw me he called out, in his thick Brussels accent, and made a long broken speech, which I shall never forget.

“Have you seen them?” he said, not pausing for a reply.  “It is the sight of all others—­the best of all.  Hsu Tung, you remember, the Imperial Tutor, who wished to make covers for his sedan chair with our hides, and who was allowed to escape when we had him tight?  Well, he is swinging high now from his own rafters, he and his whole household—­wives, children, concubines, attendants, everyone.  There are sixteen of them in all—­sixteen, all swinging from ropes tied on with their own hands, and with the chairs on which they stood kicked from under them.  That they did in their death struggles.  Everywhere they have acted in the same way.  They call it hanging, but it is not that; it is really slow strangulation, which lasts for many minutes, because at the last moment the victims become afraid and try to regain their footholds.”

The man paused a minute and licked his dry lips.  To me there was something hideous in this story being told on that sacked street.  His voice sounded a little like those Chinese trumpets, whose gurgling notes make one think instantly of evil things.  Then he went on, more furiously than ever: 

“And the wells near the Eastern Gates, have you seen them, where all the women and girls have been jumping in?  They are full of women and young girls—­quite full, because they were afraid of the troops, especially of the black troops.  The black troops become insane, the people say, when they see women.  So the women killed themselves wherever they heard the guns.  Now they are hauling up the dead bodies so that the wells will not be poisoned.  I have seen them take six and seven bodies from the same well, all clinging together, and the men have tried to kill me because I looked.  But I was well mounted; I could look as long as I liked, and then gallop away so fast that not even their shots could catch me.  The place is full of dead people, nothing but dead people everywhere, and more are dying every minute.”

Then he came up to me and whispered how soldiers were behaving after they had outraged women.  It was impossible to listen.  He said that our own inhuman soldiery had invited him to stay and see.  Yet although I swore at the man and told him to go away, I could not drive him from me.  He wanted to talk and he had found some one who had to listen.  Indeed, he clung to me all the way home, as if he had