ing.

Outside the city the Boxers massed in numbers. Inside more than a hundred
thousand waited the coming of hardly more than one-tenth of their number.
No wonder they felt secure behind their centuries-old walls.

Thaine Aydelot was accustomed to sleeping tentless on the ground and to
being beaten by rains. He was a sound sleeper and he was very weary. But
tonight he could not sleep. The morrow would see world movements that
should change all future history; in which movements he was a tiny unit,
as every furrow that his father, Asher Aydelot, had run across the face of
the prairie had by so much won it from wilderness to fruitfulness.

All night long the rain poured in torrents upon the camp. A terrific
cannonade of thunder shook the earth. The lightning tore through the
clouds in jagged tongues of flame. Where Thaine lay he could see with
every flash the great frowning black walls of Peking looming up only a few
miles away. In the lull of the thunder a more dreadful cannonading could
be heard, hour after hour. Thaine knew that inside the walls the Boxers
were besieging the Compound. And inside that Compound, if he were yet
alive, was his old teacher, Pryor Gaines. He wondered if the God of
Battles that had led the armies all this long hard way would fail them now
when one more blow might bring deliverance to His children. He remembered
again the blessing with which his father had sent him forth:

"As thy day so shall thy strength be. The Eternal God is thy refuge, and
underneath are the everlasting arms."

The memory brought peace, and at length, wrapped round in the blessing of
an absolute trust, he fell asleep.

Inside of the City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the
Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving
for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of
water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the
demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the
streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the
Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is
offered up. A human jungle, untamed and waiting, to whose wilderness the
soldier became a light-bearer, albeit he brought the gospel of gunpowder
to aid him.

The great walls about Peking enclose an area some fourteen miles in length
and twelve miles in width. Within these walls lie several cities,
separated