bear some description of the scenes of massacre that I personally visited. I was unable to go to the remoter province of Shan-si where so many devoted men and women laid down their lives and where many who escaped death endured indescribable hardships. But in the province of Shantung, where the Boxer Uprising originated, I was witness to the ruin that was wrought in many places, though the iron hand of the great Governor, Yuan Shih Kai, prevented much bloodshed. Then I turned to the northern province of Chih-li where official hands, instead of restraining, actually guided and goaded the maddened rioters.

After a delightful voyage of eighteen hours from Chefoo over a smooth sea, we anchored outside the bar, nine miles from shore, the tide not permitting our steamer to cross with its heavy load. A tug took us off and entering the Pei-ho River, we passed the famous Taku forts to the railway wharf at Tong-ku. It was significant to find foreign flags flying over the Taku forts and also over the mud-walled villages near by. Scores of merchant steamers, transports and war vessels were lying off Taku as well as hundreds of junks. The river was full of smaller craft among which were several Japanese and American gunboats. The railroad station presented a motley appearance. A regiment of Japanese had just arrived and while we were waiting, three train-loads of British Sikhs and several cars of Austrian marines and British "Tommy Atkins" came in. The platform was thronged with officers and soldiers of various nationalities, including a few Russians.

Nothing could be more dreary than the mud flats that the

F. L. Hawks Pott; "The World Crisis in China, 1900," Allen S. Will; Siege Days," A. H. Mateer; "The Siege of Peking," Wm. A. P. Martin; "The Providence of God in the Siege of Peking," C. H. Fenn; "The Tragedy of Paoting-fu," Isaac C. Ketler; "The China Martyrs of 1900," Robert C. Forsythe; "China," James H. Wilson; "China's Book of Martyrs," Luella Miner; "Two Heroes of Cathay," Luella Miner; Through Fire and Sword in Shan-si," E. H. Edwards; "Chinese Heroes," I. T. Headland; "Martyred Missionaries of the C. I. M.," Brownhall; "The Crisis in China," G. B. Smith and others.

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The greater part of the

traveller to the imperial city first sees. way from Taku to Peking, the soil is poor and little cultivated. But as we advanced, kao-liang fields were more frequent, though the growth was far behind that in Shantung at the same season. Small trees were numerous during the latter half of the trip. The soil being too thin for good crops, the people grow more fuel and fruit.

Evidences of the great catastrophe were seen long before reaching the capital. Burned villages and battered buildings lined the route. At Tien-tsin several of the foreign buildings

had shell holes.

One corrugated iron building near the railway station was pierced like a sieve and thousands of native houses were in ruins. The city wall had been razed to the ground and a highway made where it had stood-an unspeakable humiliation to the proud commercial metropolis. The Japanese soldiers teased the citizens by telling them that "a city without a wall is like a woman without clothes," and the people keenly felt the shame implied in the taunt.

In Peking, the very fact that the railroad train on which we travelled rushed noisily through a ragged chasm in the wall of the Chinese city, and stopped at the entrance of the Temple of Heaven, was suggestive of the consequences of war. The city, as a whole, was not as badly injured as I had expected to find it, but the ravages of war were evident enough. Wrecked shops, crumbled houses, shot-torn walls were on every side, while the most sacred places to a Chinese and a Manchu had been profaned. At other times the Purple Forbidden City, the Winter and Summer Palaces, the Temple of Heaven and kindred imperial enclosures are inaccessible to the foreigner. But a pass from the military authorities opened to us every door. We walked freely through the extensive grounds and into all the famous buildings-including the throne rooms which the highest Chinese official can approach only upon his knees and with his face abjectly on the stone pavement-and the private apartments of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager. I was

impressed by the vastness of the Palace buildings and grounds, the carvings of stone and wood, and the number of articles of foreign manufacture. But thousands of Americans in moderate circumstances have more spacious and comfortable bedrooms than those of the Emperor and Empress Dowager of China. All the living apartments looked cheerless. The floors were of artificial stone or brick in squares of about 20x20 inches and of course everything was covered with dust. The far-famed Temple of Heaven is the most artistic building in China, a dream of beauty, colour and grace. For a generation before the siege of Peking, no foreigner except General Grant had entered that sacred enclosure, and the Chinese raised a furore because Li Hung Chang admitted even the distinguished American. As I freely walked about the place, photographed the Temple and stood on the circular altar that is supposed to be the centre of the earth and where the Emperor worships alone at the winter solstice, British Sikhs lounged under the trees, army mules munched the luxuriant grass and quartermasters' wagons stood in long rows near the sacred spot where a Chinese would prostrate himself in reverence and fear.

We rode past innumerable ruined buildings and through motley throngs of Manchus, Chinese, German, French, Italian, British and Japanese soldiers to the Presbyterian compound at Duck Lane, which, though narrow, is not so unimportant a street as its name implies. But where devoted missionaries had so long lived and toiled, we saw only shapeless heaps of broken bricks and a few tottering fragments of walls. At the Second Street compound there was even greater ruin, if that were possible. Silently we stood beside the great hole which had once been the hospital cistern and from which the Japanese soldiers, after the siege, had taken the bodies of a hundred murdered Chinese. Not all had been Christians, for in that carnival of blood, many who were merely suspected of being friendly to foreigners were killed, while foes took advantage of the tumult to pay off old scores of hate.