uted their quota, and might,
therefore, be exempted from further looting. Scrawled in soldiers'
hands were such things as, "_Defense absolue de piller; nous autres
avons tout pris_"; or, "No looting permitted. This show is cleaned
out." Everywhere these signs were to be seen. Here they must have
worked fast and furiously....

Riding quickly, at last we reached the famous cathedral, with great
trenches and earthworks surrounding it, and the torn and battered
buildings showing how bitter the struggle had been. To our
siege-taught eyes a single look explained the nature of the defence,
and the lines which had been naturally formed. It was written as plain
as on a map. The priests and their allies had now hauled the enemy's
abandoned guns to the cathedral entrances and the spires were now
crowned with garlands of flags of all nations. But that was all. There
was no one to be seen. Everybody was away, out minding the new
business--that of making good the damage done by levying contributions
on the city at large. It was all dead quiet, silent like some deserted
graveyard. The sailors and the priests and their converts, remembering
that Heaven helps those who help themselves, had sallied out and were
reprovisioning themselves and making good their losses. Indeed, the
only men we could find were some converts engaged in stacking up
silver shoes, or _sycee_, in a secluded quadrangle. These had become
the property of the mission by the divine right of capture; there
seemed at the moment nothing strange about it.

This silent cathedral, with its vast grounds and its deserted
quadrangles torn up by the savage conflict, became to us curiously
oppressive--almost ghostlike in the bright sunshine. It seemed absurd
to imagine that forty or fifty rifle-armed sailors, a band of priests
and many thousands of converts had been ringed in here by fire and
smoke for weeks, and had lost dozens and hundreds at a time through
mine explosions. It seemed, also, equally absurd that the twenty or
thirty thousand men who had poured into Peking had already become so
quickly lost in the expanses of the city. Where were they all?...

My mad companion had tired, too, of looking, and wanted again to rush
off and discover some signs of life. He wanted, above all, to see the
place where the first companies of the French infantry had suddenly
come on a mixed crowd of Boxers, soldiers and townspeople fleeing in
panic all mixed together, and had mown them do