nese banditti were lurking
just outside the Legation base to swallow up these brave
creatures!--and in a compact body they sally forth. These are the
married men: marriage excuses everything when the guns begin to play.
Thus the Secretary of Legation, whose name I will not divulge even
with an initial, amused me immensely yesterday by calculating how much
more valuable he was to the State as a father of a family than an
unmarried youngster like myself. He tried to prove to me that if he
died the economic value of his children would suffer--what a fool he
was!--and that my own value capitalised after the manner of
mathematicians was very small. I listened to him carefully, and then
asked if the difference between a brave man and a coward had any
economic significance. He became suddenly angry and left me. Some of
the besieged are becoming truly revolting.

Even P----, who some people think ought to stay in the remains of his
own Legation, is rather disgusted, and as he marches out in an
embroidered nightshirt, with little birds picked out in red thread on
it, he is not as absurd as I first thought. Poor man, he is
attempting to do his duty after his own lights, and excepting two or
three others, he has been the most creditable of all the elderly men,
who think that position excuses everything.

Labouring at the making of sandbags, the women sit under shelter, and
keep company with those men who have not the stomach to go out. And as
shells have been falling more and more frequently in and around this
safe base, and rumour has told them that the outer lines may give way,
bomb-proof shelters have been dug in many quarters ready to receive
all those who are willing to crouch for hours to avoid the possibility
of being hit....

Otherwise, there is nothing much to note in the British Legation, for
here the storm and stress of the outer lines come back oddly enough
quite faintly, excepting during a general attack. The dozens of walls
account for that. In the evenings the missionaries now gather and sing
hymns ... sometimes Madame P----, the wife of the great Russian Bank
Director, takes compassion, and gives an _aria_ from some opera. She
used to be a diva in the St. Petersburg Opera House, they say, years
ago, and her voice comes like a sweet dream in such surroundings. A
week ago a strange thing happened when she was giving an impromptu
concert. She was singing the Jewel song from _Faust_ so ringingly that
the Chinese sn