It was not until four or five o’clock in the afternoon that we were relieved, and then in a fashion that highly flattered our vanity.  The little Japanese colonel appeared in person with a small force of riflemen and some stretcher bearers, and he fell back in astonishment when he saw our occupation.  We had pushed forward a lookout a few yards in advance, and the rest of us were playing noughts and crosses on some broken tiles.  In front of us the barricades were silent, and the Japanese sailor so curiously wounded in the earlier part of the day was fiercely wrangling with an English volunteer, who had taught him the game and had just insulted him by saying he was cheating.  The colonel declared he had thought us all dead, but that although he had sent twice to find out how we were faring, the tremendous storm of shells and bullets raging round our entire lines had made it impossible to reinforce us.  The French, he said, had been so heavily beaten that he had had to prepare for a general retreat into the British Legation; the Germans had been swept off the Tartar Wall; the Americans had been shaken and almost driven back; and had not the Chinese themselves tired of the game, another hour would have seen a general retreat sounded.  We were much commended for not having fallen back, but we pointed out that it had been really nothing, since we had only had one man slightly wounded.  Still, it was an experience hard to beat to be left in a house practically levelled to the ground by shell-fire, and as I got eighteen hours off duty granted me, during which time I slept solidly without waking once, the whole affair remains most firmly impressed on the tablets of my memory.  It is only when you have been through it that you understand what you can endure.

All this was some days ago, and was really nothing to what we had the day before yesterday, which happened to be the 1st of July.

The Chinese artillery practice, although poor, the guns and shells being hopelessly ancient, had become so annoying and so distressing that it was determined to adopt a policy of reprisals, taking the form of sorties, and by bayonetting the gunners and damaging the guns if we could not drag them off, to induce the enemy to make his offensive less galling.  The ball was opened by an attack which was miserably conducted on the selfsame gun that had so harshly treated that little post I have described a few days before.  On the 1st of the month, Lieutenant P——­, the commander of the Italian hillock, laid a plan of sortie before headquarters to which consent was given.  Supported by British marines and volunteers, the Italians were to make a sortie in force from their position and seize the gun.  The Japanese were to co-operate from their barricades and trenches by opening a heavy fire, and moving slowly forward in extended order as soon as the Italian charge had commenced.  All the morning the Italians were noisily preparing, and as soon as their attack was delivered, it justified