!
Vous ne finissez pas_," he ended despairingly, and rushed off again to
see whether he could find any more.

The blood was rising to our men's heads badly by now, and I saw
several who could stand it no longer stabbing at the few dead Boxers
we had secured. We had none of us imagined we were coming to such
scenes as these; for nobody would have believed that such brutal
things were possible. When we judged we had finished rescuing every
one alive, a man in the most pitiable condition ran out from behind
the smouldering cathedral carrying a newly severed human head in
either hand. He seemed but little abashed when he saw us, but came
forward rapidly enough towards us, glancing the while over his
shoulder. Several sailors were rushing at him with their bayonets,
ready to spit him, when he fell on his knees, and, tearing open his
tunic, disclosed to our astonished eyes a bronze crucifix with a
silver Christ hung on it. "_Je suis catholique_," he cried to us
repeatedly and rapidly in fair French, and the sailors stayed their
cold steel until we had extracted an explication. Then it transpired
that he had used this horrible device to escape the notice of some
Boxers who were still at work in a street on the other side of the
cathedral. We ran round promptly on hearing this, and caught sight of
a few fellows stripped to the waist, and gory with blood as I have
never seen men before. Instead of fleeing, they met our charge with
resolution, and one tall fellow put me in considerable danger of my
life with a long spear, finally escaping before we could shoot him
down.

On this side the ruins of the cathedral were covered with corpses
burned black from the heat of the flames and exposure to the sun. One
woman, by some freak of nature, had her arms poised above her head as
she sat dead, shrivelled almost beyond human recognition. It was
probable that the Boxers had pitched many of their victims alive into
the flames and driven them back with their swords and spears whenever
they attempted to escape....

At last we got away with everybody who was still alive, as far as we
could judge. Tramping back slowly and painfully, the rescued looked
the most pitiable concourse I have ever seen. Somehow it was exactly
like that eloquent picture in "Michael Serogoff," showing the crowds
of Siberian prisoners being driven away by Feofar Khan's Tartars after
the capture of Omsk. Among our people there were the same old
granddames, wrinkled