they ran. The soldiery who
had been doing all the fighting and firing must have been the more
modern field forces engaged in the last attacks on the Legations, or
those driven in on Peking by the rout on the Tientsin road. Still,
there was nothing worth seeing, and the miniature Tartar towers
crowning the angles of the great pink walls looked down in contempt,
as if conscious that no enemy could hurt them. I must push along.

I trotted quickly, exchanging chaff with the Americans, who called out
to me with curious oaths that they had had no breakfast, and wanted to
know why in h---- this fun was being stopped, and that they were being
left there. Alas! I could give them no news. I only swore back in the
same playful way. At the end of an immense wall I came on the last of
this soldiery--a corporal's guard, squatting round a small wicket-gate
and looking very tired. They told me that they were still being shot
at from somewhere on the inside; and even as I paused and looked a
curious _pot-pourri_ of missiles grounded angrily against the
gate-top. There were modern bullets, old iron shot, and two arrows--a
strange assortment. Somehow those quivering arrows, shot from over the
immense pink walls, and attempting to vent their old-fashioned wrath
on the insolent invaders who had penetrated where never before an
enemy's foot had trod, made us all stare and remain amazed. It seemed
so curious and impossible--so out of date. Then one of the Americans
ran into a guard-house, bringing out with him a huge Manchu bow, which
he had secreted there as his plunder. He plucked with difficulty the
arrows out of the woodwork in which they had been plunged, and with
an immense twanging of catgut sent them high into the air, until they
were suddenly lost to our sight in the far beyond. An answer was not
long in coming. In less than half a minute a crackle of firearms broke
harshly on the air, and a fresh covey of bullets whistled high
overhead. The enemy was plainly still on the alert inside the last
enclosures, where no one might penetrate. What a pity it had been
stopped....

I rode off, bearing away some flags and swords, and, making due east,
as last reached some broad avenues near the Eastern Gates of this
Forbidden City.... Fresh masses of moving men now appeared. The main
body of French infantry I had seen a couple of hours before were being
marched in here, while smaller bodies were tramping off to the north,
and sappers were blo