walls and outworks, we are running out counter-mines under his--at
least, we are attempting this by plunging a great depth into the
earth, and only beginning to drive horizontally many feet below the
surface line. Hundreds of men are on this work, but the Peking soil is
not generous; it is, indeed, a cursed soil. On top there are thick
layers of dust--that terrible Peking dust which is so rapidly
converted into such clinging slush by a few minutes' rain. Then
immediately below, for eight feet or so, there is a curious soil full
of stones and _debris_, which must mean something geologically, but
which no one can explain. Finally, at about a fathom and a half there
is a sea of despond--the real and solid substratum, thick, tightly
bound clay, which has to be pared off in thin slices just as you would
do with very old cheese. This is work which breaks your hands and your
back. Somebody must do it, however; the same men who do everything
help this along as well....

With all this mining going on many curious finds are being made, which
give something to talk about. In one place, ten feet below the
surface, hundreds and hundreds of ancient stone cannon-balls have been
found which must go back very many centuries. Some say they are six
hundred years and more old, because the Mongol conqueror, Kublai Khan,
who built the Tartar City of Peking, lived in the thirteenth century,
and these cannon-balls lie beneath where tilled fields must then have
been. Are they traces of a forgotten siege? In other places splendid
drains have been bared--drains four feet high and three broad, which
run everywhere. Once, when Marco Polo was young, Peking must have been
a fit and proper place, and the magnificent streets magnificently
clean. Now ...!

To-day the soldier-spy has brought in news that the Court is preparing
to flee, because of the approach of our avenging armies, and that the
moving troops and the hundreds of carts which can be seen picking
their way through the burned and ruined Ch'ien Men great street in the
Chinese city will all be engaged in this flight. Our troops are
advancing steadily, he says, driving everything before them. Still no
one believes these stories very much. We have had six weeks of it now
and several distinct phases. Somehow it seems impossible that the
whole tragedy should end in this unfinished way--that thousands of
European troops should march in unmolested and find us as we are....
There is practically no