In this curious fashion the memorable night of the 12th passed away, with sometimes one picquet firing, sometimes another, and with everybody waiting wearily for the morning.  We had almost lost interest by that time.

At half-past four the pink light began chasing away the gloom; the shadows lightened, and day at last broke.  At six o’clock native refugees from the foreign houses that had been burned came slinking silently in with white faces and trembling hands, all quite broken down by terrible experiences.  One gate-keeper, whose case was tragically unique, had lost everything and everybody belonging to him, and was weeping in a curious Chinese way, without tears and without much contortion of features, but persistently, without any break or intermission, in a somewhat terrifying fashion.  His wife, six children, his father and mother, and a number of relations had all been burned alive—­thirteen in all.  They had been driven into the flames with spears.  Moaning like a sick dog, and making us all feel cowardly because we had not attempted a rescue, the man sought refuge in an outhouse.  Sir R——­ H——­ was still standing at his post, looking terribly old and hardly less distressed than the wretched fugitives pouring in.  His old offices and residences, where forty years before he had painfully begun a life-long work, were all stamped out of existence, and the iron had entered into his soul.  A number of the officers commanding detachments, and people belonging to various Legations, attempted to glean details as to the strength of the Boxer detachments from these survivors, but nobody could give any information worth having.  I noticed that no Ministers came; they were all in bed!

At eight o’clock, still afoot, we heard that there was a deuce of a row going on at the Ha-ta Gate, because it was still locked and the key was gone.  It now transpired that a party of volunteers, led by the Swiss hotel-keeper of the place and his wife, had marched down to the gate after the Boxers had rushed in, had locked it, and taken the key home to bed, so that no one else could pay us their attentions from this quarter.  This is the simplest and the most sensible thing which has been yet done, and it shows how we will have to take the law into our own hands if we are to survive.

In this fashion the Boxers were ushered in on us.  Most of us kept awake until ten or eleven in the morning for fear that by sleeping we might miss some incidents.  But even the Boxers had apparently become tired, for there was not a sign of a disturbance after midnight.  In spite of the quiet, however, the streets remain absolutely deserted, and we have no means of knowing what is going to happen next.

X

BARRICADES AND RELIEFS

16th June, 1900.

* * * * *

We have entered quite naturally in these unnatural times on a new phase of existence.  It is the time of barricades and punitive expeditions; of the Legations tardily bestirring themselves in their own defence, and realising that they must try and forget their private politics if they are even to live, not to say one day to resume their various rivalries and animosities.  Imperceptibly we are being impelled to take action; we must do something.