lay the two battleships which formed the backbone of the Chinese Navy at
that time--the _Ting Yuen_, the flagship of Admiral Ting, with
Frobisher's pet abomination, Prince Hsi, as captain; and the _Chen
Yuen_, commanded, like his own ship, by an Englishman.

Both these craft were old and out of date, having been built as long ago
as the year 1879; but their armour was enormously thick, and both of
them carried two eighty-ton monster guns, placed in turrets and set in
_echelon_, so that the immense weight of the weapons should be evenly
distributed. The ships themselves were a little over seven thousand
tons displacement, and were fitted with particularly long and strongly
reinforced rams, upon the effective use of which the Chinese admiral was
building largely--not without justification, as events proved.

These two battleships completely dwarfed the fleet of cruisers lying
above and below them in the river, none of these being of more than
three thousand five hundred tons--less than half the size of the
flagship, and of course not nearly so heavily armed. In fact, none of
the cruisers carried anything more powerful in the way of guns than the
five-inch weapons which Frobisher's own ship, the latest addition to the
Navy, mounted; and of these the _Chih' Yuen_ possessed only two, one in
a barbette forward, and one similarly mounted aft.

Then came two sister ships, cruisers of three thousand tons, the
_Yen-fu_ and the _Kau-ling_, armoured vessels, and one of two thousand
seven hundred tons, also armoured, named the _Shan-si_; while close up
under the walls of the city lay a couple of protected cruisers, of two
thousand five hundred tons each, the _Yung-chau_ and the _Tung-yen_.
Frobisher's old acquaintance, the _Hat-yen_, which had been Admiral
Wong-lih's flagship at the battle of Asan, was also to be seen busily
preparing for sea; and the dispatch vessel _San-chau_, which he likewise
recognised, had also been pressed into service. The _Su-chen_, in which
Frobisher had made his ill-fated attack on the pirates, was still in the
hands of the repairers, who had managed to spin out the job of putting
her to rights again after the fight ever since the time of her return
from the Hoang-ho. Lastly, there was the old cruiser _Kwei-lin_, which
had been in the Navy for over twenty years, and which had not moved from
her anchorage for the last decade. She was absolutely useless as a
fighting machine; and, short as the Chines