the
Legation was no place to receive such men and his own house had been
burned down.

Alas for the mournful desolation that met his eyes when he made a
melancholy pilgrimage, as it were, to his old quarters! Nothing was
left of the house but a few charred walls. Broken tiles lay scattered
here and there, and he picked up the head of a pretty little Saxe
shepherdess, of all things the most fragile and improbable to survive
such a storm. The rest of his belongings had disappeared utterly--all
the treasures of a lifetime had been burned or looted--priceless
letters from Chinese Gordon and from Gladstone, the wonderful
rainbow-silk scrolls for his Chinese patent of nobility, the
photographs of all the famous men with whom he had been associated in
the past--everything.

He was glad enough to get two rooms behind Kierulff's shop for
temporary living quarters. What matter if his hall door was littered
with packing-cases, or if his sitting-room windows fronted upon waste
ground where a herd of mules scampered? He soon learned to pick his
way among the former; the latter, with characteristic caution, always
respected his panes, and anyway it was not the time for finicking over
trifles.

For an office he hired a tiny little temple nestling under the walls
of the Tartar City. It was but a small _pied-a-terre_, yet all he
required, for the Customs Archives had been burnt, and the Deputy
Inspector General, Sir Robert Bredon, with the Inspectorate Staff,
left immediately for Shanghai to begin the difficult task of picking
up the threads of Customs work there.

Meanwhile the _Tajens_ (heads of boards) wrote to the I.G. asking for
a safe convoy through the foreign lines, and he sent one of his own
men to bring them down, since, though poor enough in other things,
they were so rich in fears. Five came this first time, but one acted
as spokesman to voice the grief of all over what had occurred, and to
exonerate the Emperor and the Empress-Dowager of blame. No doubt
the two sovereigns _were_ innocent of responsibility for what had
happened--no one would believe it at the time, however--and _were_
captured, as these ministers said, by "officials of another way of
thinking, and made to appear as if approving what they disapproved and
ordering what they really forbade."

Their position is not too difficult to understand when one remembers
that, Oriental fashion, they were shut up in their palaces, where no
breath of impartial advi