swore and he cursed and he gesticulated,
until finally cease fire was sounded and the guns were ordered down.
All the Frenchmen were furious, and I saw P----, the Minster, go down
in company with the gaunt-looking Spanish _doyen_, vowing vengeance
and declaiming loudly that if they were stopped everybody must be
stopped too. There must be no favouring; that they would not have. I
understood, then, why the mountain guns had come so quickly into
action; they were gaining time for that exhausted colonial infantry to
get round to some convenient spot and begin a separate attack. It was
each one for himself.

Somehow I understood now that it was a useless time for ceremony, and
that one must act just as one wished. So, finding some ponies tethered
to a post below, without a word I mounted one and rode rapidly back to
the Palace. For an instant, as I passed the great Ch'ien Men Gate, I
could see Indian troops filing out in their hundreds, and forcing a
path through the press of incoming transport and guns. Evidently the
British commanders considered that the thing was over; that it was no
use going on. Already they had had enough of our Peking methods....

I must have ridden nearly a mile straight through the vast enclosures
of the Palace, past lines and lines of American infantry lying on the
ground, with the reserve artillery trains halted under cover of high
walls, before I saw ahead of me a set of gates which were still
unbroken. General firing had quite ceased now, and excepting for an
occasional shot coming from some distant corner, there was no sound.
The bulk of the American infantry had not even been advanced as far as
I had come. A skirmishing line, evidently formed only a short time
before my arrival, was still lying on the ground; but the men were
laughing and smoking, and the officers had withdrawn out of the heat
of the sun into a side building, where they were examining a map. The
scaling-ladders were left behind. I was soon told that orders had come
direct from headquarters to stop the attack absolutely, and not to
advance an inch further on any consideration. The inner courts of the
Palace and the residences of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager could
not be approached until concerted action had been taken up by all the
Allies. I laughed--it was the hydra-headed diplomacy of Peking raising
its head defiantly less than eighteen hours after the first soldiers
had rushed in....

The massive set of gates in