wn, and
only the power of Omnipotence could stay the bloody hands. So the long
hours of the dreadful night dragged on.

At length came daydawn. The storm had rolled away. A lull in the besieging
guns gave the Legation a little rest of mind. Hungry and helpless, it
waited the passing of another day. A silence seemed to fill the city and
the wiser ones wondered anxiously what it might portend.

Suddenly, in the midst of it, a great gun boomed out to the northeast.
Another gun, and another. Then came a pause and the besieged listened
eagerly, for their own walls felt no shock. Again came the bellow of
cannon, nearer and heavier, repeated and repeated, and the roll of smoke
and the rattling fusillade of bullet shots told that a battle was on.
Outside the gates! An army come against Peking! The Army of Deliverance!
They were here fighting for the Christians! Oh, the music of birds' song,
of rippling waters, of gently pulsing zephyrs, the music of old cathedral
chimes, of grandest orchestras--nothing of them all could sound so like to
the music that the morning stars sang together as this deafening peal of
cannon, this rippling rhythm of Krag rifles.

With bursting hearts they waited and watched the great wall to the north.
It is sixty feet high and fully as wide at its base, tapering to
twenty-five feet across the top. Could the gates be stormed? Could this
wall be shaken? From the highest points inside the Compound eager eyes
scanned the northeast as the battle raged on with crash of shells and whir
of bullets. Then down to the waiting ones came a message that seemed to
fly to every ear in the besieged city, making men and women drop to the
ground in a very ecstasy of joy.

"They've run up the Stars and Stripes on the northeast wall!"

The sword of the Lord and of Gideon was come again to Peking, as it came
once long ago to the Valley of Jezreel.

The Allied Armies broke camp early on the morning of August fourteen in
the year of nineteen hundred. Six miles away stood the most impassable
defense an army of the West might ever storm. Yet the twelve thousand men
did not hesitate. With General Chaffee's troops in the front of the line
they fought through fiercely skirmishing forces up to the hoary old city's
gates, the Fourteenth United States Infantry leading the way. The American
guns cleared the Chinese soldiery from the top of the walls, and the
American cannon were in line ready to blow open the huge gates.

"I wan