n driven into the
flames with spears. Moaning like a sick dog, and making us all feel
cowardly because we had not attempted a rescue, the man sought refuge
in an outhouse. Sir R---- H---- was still standing at his post,
looking terribly old and hardly less distressed than the wretched
fugitives pouring in. His old offices and residences, where forty
years before he had painfully begun a life-long work, were all stamped
out of existence, and the iron had entered into his soul. A number of
the officers commanding detachments, and people belonging to various
Legations, attempted to glean details as to the strength of the Boxer
detachments from these survivors, but nobody could give any
information worth having. I noticed that no Ministers came; they were
all in bed!

At eight o'clock, still afoot, we heard that there was a deuce of a
row going on at the Ha-ta Gate, because it was still locked and the
key was gone. It now transpired that a party of volunteers, led by the
Swiss hotel-keeper of the place and his wife, had marched down to the
gate after the Boxers had rushed in, had locked it, and taken the key
home to bed, so that no one else could pay us their attentions from
this quarter. This is the simplest and the most sensible thing which
has been yet done, and it shows how we will have to take the law into
our own hands if we are to survive.

In this fashion the Boxers were ushered in on us. Most of us kept
awake until ten or eleven in the morning for fear that by sleeping we
might miss some incidents. But even the Boxers had apparently become
tired, for there was not a sign of a disturbance after midnight. In
spite of the quiet, however, the streets remain absolutely deserted,
and we have no means of knowing what is going to happen next.

X

BARRICADES AND RELIEFS

16th June, 1900.

* * * * *

We have entered quite naturally in these unnatural times on a new
phase of existence. It is the time of barricades and punitive
expeditions; of the Legations tardily bestirring themselves in their
own defence, and realising that they must try and forget their private
politics if they are even to live, not to say one day to resume their
various rivalries and animosities. Imperceptibly we are being impelled
to take action; we must do something.

We woke up late on the 14th to the fact that loopholed barricades had
been everywhere begun on our streets, as effective bars to the inrus