e whole reason is that there is internal trouble in the American
contingent, and that one of the officers is hated. Whether this is
really so or not, I do not know; we never know anything certain now.
But although the American has but little discipline, as a sharpshooter
on the defensive he is quite unrivalled by reason of his superior
intelligence and the interest he takes in devoting himself to the
matter in hand. You only have to see these mutinous marines at work
for five minutes as snipers to be convinced of that. I saw a case in
point only a few hours ago. Men were wanted to drive back, or at least
intimidate, a whole nest of Chinese riflemen, who had cautiously
established themselves in a big block of Chinese houses across the dry
canal, which separates the British Legation from the Su wang-fu. This
block of houses is so placed that an enfilading fire can reach a
number of points which are hidden from the Japanese lines; and this
enfilading fire was badly needed, as the Chinese riflemen were
becoming more and more daring, and had already made several hits.
Half a dozen of the best American shots were requisitioned.

The six men who came over went deliberately to work in a very
characteristic way. They split into pairs, and each pair got, by some
means binoculars. After a quarter of an hour they settled down to
work, lying on their stomachs. First they stripped off their slouch
hats and hung them up elsewhere, but instead of putting them a few
feet to the right or left as everybody else, with a vague idea of Red
Indian warfare, within our lines had been doing, they placed them in
such a way as to attract the enemy's fire and make the enemy disclose
himself, which is quite a different matter. This they did by adding
their coats and decorating adjacent trees with them so far away from
where they lay that there could be no chance of the enemy's bad
shooting hitting them by mistake--as had been the case elsewhere where
this device had been tried.

All this by-play took some time, but at last they were ready--one man
armed with a pair of binoculars and the other with the American naval
rifle--the Lee straight-pull, which fires the thinnest pin of a
cartridge I have seen and has but a two-pound trigger pull. Even then
nothing was done for perhaps another ten minutes, and in some cases
for half an hour; it varied according to individual requirements. Then
when the quarry was located by the man with the binoculars, and t