house, on a
small island, with the Empress Dowager's eunuchs to guard him. These
were changed daily lest they might sympathize with their unhappy
monarch and devise some means for his liberation. Each day when the
guard was changed, the drawbridge connecting the island with the
mainland was removed, leaving the Emperor to wander about in the court
of his palace-prison, or sit on the southern terrace where it
overlooked the lotus lake, waiting, hoping and perhaps expecting that
his last appeal to Kang Yu-wei in which he said: "My heart is filled
with a great sorrow which pen and ink cannot describe; you must go
abroad at once and without a moment's delay devise some means to save
me," might bring forth some fruit.

Whether this confinement interfered with the health of the Emperor or
not it is impossible to say, but from the first he was made to pose as
an invalid. As his failing health was constantly referred to in the
Peking Gazette, the foreigners began to fear that it was the intention
to dispose of the Emperor, and such pressure was brought to bear on the
government as led them to allow the physician attached to the French
legation to enter the palace and make an examination of His Majesty. He
found nothing that fresh air and exercise would not remedy and assured
the government that there was no cause for alarm, and from that time we
heard nothing more of his precarious condition.

One day not long after the coup d'etat a eunuch came rushing into our
compound, his face scratched and bleeding, and knocking his head on the
ground before me, begged me to save his life.

"What is the matter?" I inquired.

"Oh! let me join the church!" he pleaded.

"What do you want to join the church for?" I asked.

"To save my life," he answered.

"But what is this all about?" I urged, raising him to his feet.

"You know the eunuch who came to you to buy books," he said.

I assured him that I knew him.

"Well," he continued, "I am a friend of his. The Empress Dowager has
banished him, burned all the books he bought for the Emperor, and I am
in danger of losing my head. Let me join the church, and thus save my
life."

All I could do was to inform him that this was not the business of the
church, and after further conversation he left and I never saw him
again.

Day after day as the Emperor received the Peking Gazette on his lonely
island he saw one after another of his coveted reforms vanish like mist
before the pen of