s, we took it. What else could we have done? We had given them
every opportunity, for fourteen years. Ah, these Chinese! They are
impossible. No one can understand them!"

We are going to leave Peking within a day or two and go down to the
tropics for the winter. This is the end of November and it is getting
bitterly cold, and with the on-coming of cold weather we seem to have
reverted suddenly to our original plan of visiting Angkor. So you will
get no more Chinese letters from me until the spring, when we are
planning to return to Peking. It has all been most exciting, most
interesting, but we are thoroughly tired out with having our sympathies
so played upon, so wrought up, and feeling ourselves impotent. It is
distressing to stand by and see such things transpire under our very
eyes, injustices which we are powerless to prevent. I shall be anxious
to know whether anything of this affair has crept into our American
papers. I suppose not, however. We are anxious only to see
"civilization" triumph in Europe. The backwash of civilization in the
Orient is not our concern. All I can say is this: The world would have
rung with news of such a grab if Japan had been guilty of it.

PART II

I

THE RETURN TO PEKING

We have been away now for three months, and it seems like getting home,
to be back in our beloved Peking. We reached the shabby old station, the
other evening, worn out from the long two-days' journey up from
Shanghai, and it was good to have the porter from the Wagons-Lits greet
us and welcome us like old friends. It was pleasant to walk back along
the long platform of the station, under the Water Gate, and to find
ourselves, in a minute or two, in the warm, bright lobby of this
precious hotel. The door-keeper knew us; the clerks at the desk knew
us; and the various "boys," both in the dining-room and up-stairs in our
corridor, all knew us and greeted us with what seemed to our tired souls
real and satisfying cordiality. "Missy way long time. Glad Missy back,"
"Missy like Peking best?" And Missy certainly does. Moreover, if you
have once lived in Peking, if you have ever stayed here long enough to
fall under the charm and interest of this splendid barbaric capital, if
you have once seen the temples and glorious monuments of Chili, all
other parts of China seem dull and second rate. We began here, you see.
If we had begun at the other end,--landed at Shanghai, for instance, and
worked our way no