the American has but little discipline, as a sharpshooter on the defensive he is quite unrivalled by reason of his superior intelligence and the interest he takes in devoting himself to the matter in hand.  You only have to see these mutinous marines at work for five minutes as snipers to be convinced of that.  I saw a case in point only a few hours ago.  Men were wanted to drive back, or at least intimidate, a whole nest of Chinese riflemen, who had cautiously established themselves in a big block of Chinese houses across the dry canal, which separates the British Legation from the Su wang-fu.  This block of houses is so placed that an enfilading fire can reach a number of points which are hidden from the Japanese lines; and this enfilading fire was badly needed, as the Chinese riflemen were becoming more and more daring, and had already made several hits.  Half a dozen of the best American shots were requisitioned.

The six men who came over went deliberately to work in a very characteristic way.  They split into pairs, and each pair got, by some means binoculars.  After a quarter of an hour they settled down to work, lying on their stomachs.  First they stripped off their slouch hats and hung them up elsewhere, but instead of putting them a few feet to the right or left as everybody else, with a vague idea of Red Indian warfare, within our lines had been doing, they placed them in such a way as to attract the enemy’s fire and make the enemy disclose himself, which is quite a different matter.  This they did by adding their coats and decorating adjacent trees with them so far away from where they lay that there could be no chance of the enemy’s bad shooting hitting them by mistake—­as had been the case elsewhere where this device had been tried.

All this by-play took some time, but at last they were ready—­one man armed with a pair of binoculars and the other with the American naval rifle—­the Lee straight-pull, which fires the thinnest pin of a cartridge I have seen and has but a two-pound trigger pull.  Even then nothing was done for perhaps another ten minutes, and in some cases for half an hour; it varied according to individual requirements.  Then when the quarry was located by the man with the binoculars, and the man with the rifle had finished asking a lot of playful questions so as to gain time, the first shots were fired.  The marines armed with binoculars were not unduly elated by any one shot, but merely reported progress in a characteristic American fashion—­that is, by a system of chaffing.  This provided tonic, and presently the bullets crept in so close to the marks that all chaff was forgotten.  Sometimes it took an hour, or even two, to bring down a single man; but no matter how long the time necessary might be, the Americans stayed patiently with their man until the sniper’s life’s blood was drilled out of him by these thin pencils of Lee straight-pull bullets.  Once, and once only, did excitement overtake a linked pair