Outside and around us roars the noise of the Tartar city.  At night the noise ceases, for the inner and outer cities are closed to one another by great gates; but at midnight the gates are opened by sleepy Manchu guards for a brief ten minutes, so that gorgeous red and blue-trapped carts, drawn by sleek mules, may speed into the Imperial City for the Daybreak Audience with the Throne.  These conveyances contain the high officials of the Empire.  It has been noticed by a Legation stroller on the Wall—­the Tartar Wall—­that the number of carts passing in at midnight is far greater than usual; that the guards of the city gates now and again stop and question a driver.  It is nothing.

Meanwhile the dust rises in clouds.  It is very dry this year—­that is all.

II

MUTTERINGS

24th May, 1900.

* * * * *

We are beginning to call them Boxers—­grudgingly and sometimes harking back and giving them their full name, “Society of Harmonious Fists,” or the “Righteous Harmony Fist Society”; but still a beginning has been made, and they are becoming Boxers by the inevitable process of shortening which distinguishes speech.

have been talking about them a good deal to-day, these Boxers, since it has been the birthday of her most excellent Majesty Queen Victoria, and the British Legation has been en fete.  Her Majesty’s Minister, in fine, has been entertaining us in the vast and princely gardens of the British Legation at his own expense.  Weird Chinese lanterns have been lighted in the evening and slung around the grounds; champagne has been flowing with what effervescence it could muster; the eleven Legations and the nondescripts have forgotten their cares for a brief space and have been enjoying the evening air and the music of Sir R——­ H——­’s Chinese band.  Looking at lighted lanterns, drinking champagne cup, listening to a Chinese band—­where the devil is the protocol and the political situation, you will say?  Not quite forgotten, since the French Minister attracted the attention of many all the evening by his vehement manner.  I pushed up once, too, and with a polite bow listened to what he was saying.  Ah, the old words, the eternal words, the political situation, or the situation politique, whichever way you like to use them.  But still you listen a bit, for it is droll to hear the yet unaccustomed word Boxers in French. “Les Boxeurs,” he says; and what the French Minister says is always worth listening to, since he has the best Intelligence corps in the world—­the Catholic priests of China—­at his disposal.