ell fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin
siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks,
organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the
face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers
happened to win.

But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of
the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those
days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and
influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising
calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her.
With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he
took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the
little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town.
Finally, as they passed in front of the barracks of the German
contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within,
an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his
cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his
_Woerterbuch_ English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that the calf of
the cow inside?' Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff
question, he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside must join itself
to cow inside.' And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his
bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home
empty-handed."

As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the
bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to
flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged
out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with
his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines.
Because he thought that he might save from probable confiscation a
valuable coal mining property at Tongshan about eighty miles from
Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property outright to Hoover's name
for the protection of the foreign title. Hoover refused this, but did
undertake to go to Europe on a contract with Chang to enlist the aid of
the Belgian and British bondholders of the Company to protect the
property. These men rescued and reorganized the Company, dispatched
their own financial agents to China, and appointed Hoover chief engineer
to superintend the real development of the great property.

The wily old Celestial fin