liant smile upon me.

"You Americans we hate least," she explained. "You have done the least
harm to us. And some of you, individually, we like."

"But, naturally, you hate us all?"

"Why not?" she replied. "See what you foreigners are doing to us, have
done to us, are still trying to do to us. Can you blame us? Judge for
yourself."

"I can perfectly understand your Boxer uprising," I told her, "when you
tried to get rid of us all--"

"I'm glad you can understand that," she retorted. "Few foreigners do. We
feel that way still; only we can't show it as we did then."

Into my mind came a recollection of the high stone wall surrounding the
British legation, on which are painted the words, "Lest we forget."
Every day, as one passes in or out of the legation quarter by that road,
one's attention is arrested by those words. "Lest we forget." Every
foreigner in Peking is thus reminded of those dreadful months of siege
in 1900. But so is every Chinese of the upper classes; so is every
rickshaw coolie who stops to point out those words to the tourists as he
passes. Why remember? Why not try to forget? Neither side will forget.
Neither foreigner nor Chinese has any intention of forgetting. The huge
indemnities that are paid out year by year by the Chinese make
forgetting impossible. Of all the countries that received an indemnity,
America was the only one that tried to forget. Yet she did it by
erecting a monument to her forgetfulness, or forgivingness, in the shape
of a college-preparatory school for Chinese boys, and is using part of
her yearly indemnity fund to maintain it; and "Lest we forget" is
written large upon its walls.

But in contrast to the bitterness of the little Chinese lady, we
received an impression to-day of quite opposite character. We called
upon the editor of one of the Chinese papers. We have seen him many
times, and he has often had tea with us in the lobby of our hotel, but
upon this occasion he sent us a note and asked us to call on him at
his office. He kept us waiting a few minutes in a shabby, dingy
office, littered with papers and newspaper clippings, the regulation
untidy office of a newspaper man. When he finally arrived, after ten
minutes' delay, he apologized profusely, saying it was five o'clock,
the hour for his bowl of porridge. He looked as if he needed it, too,
for he was a thin, nervous little man, a burning, ardent soul
contained in a gaunt, emaciated body.

Straightway, after hi