it was the twenty dimes that deferred
slow starvation. Banks kept open through the night. Officials and
clerks worked to exhaustion, satisfying demands, hoping to placate
the mob and avert the unthinkable results of a riot. Countless
soldiers swarmed the streets with fixed bayonets. But the
bloodless witch has no claim to one single heart-beat of loyalty
from the unpaid wretches who wear the Imperial uniform; and when by
simply tying a white handkerchief on their arms they go over in
groups of hundreds to the Revolutionists, they are only repaying
treachery in its own foul coin.

Though I hate to leave Jack even for an hour, I have to get out
each day for some fresh air. To-day it seemed to me, as I walked
among the crowds, fantastic in the flickering flames of bonfires
and incandescent light, that life had done its cruel worst to these
people--had written her bitterest tokens of suffering and woe in
the deeply furrowed faces and sullenly hopeless eyes.

Earlier in the year thousands of farmers and small tradesmen had
come in from the country to escape floods, famine and robber-bands.
Hundreds had sold their children for a dollar or so and for days
lived on barks and leaves, as they staggered toward Peking for
relief.

Now thousands more are rushing from the city to the hills or to the
desert, fleeing from riot and war, the strong carrying the sick,
the young the old--each with a little bundle of household goods,
all camping near the towering gates in the great city wall, ready
to dash through when the keeper flings them open in the early
morning.

And through it all the merciless execution of any suspect or
undesirable goes merrily on. Close by my carriage a cart passed.
In it were four wretched creatures with hands and feet bound and
pigtails tied together. They were on their way to a plot of
crimson ground where hundreds part with their heads. By the side
of the cart ran a ten-year-old boy, his uplifted face distorted
with agony of grief. One of the prisoners was his father.

I watched the terrified masses till a man and woman of the
respectable farmer class came by, with not enough rags on to hide
their half-starved bodies. Between them they carried on their
shoulders a bamboo pole, from which was swung a square of matting.
On this, in rags, but clean, lay a mere skeleton of a baby with
beseeching eyes turned to its mother; and from its lips came
piteous little whines like a hunger-tortured kitten.