now a roofless ring of
blackened walls, Nelson's Column lay shattered across Trafalgar
Square, and the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the Mansion
House mingled their fragments in the heart of the almost deserted
city.

Only three of the great buildings of London had suffered no damage.
These were the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, and St Paul's,
which had been spared in accordance with special orders issued by the
commanders of the League. The two former were spared for the same
reason that the Germans had spared Strasburg Cathedral in
1870--because their destruction would have been a loss, not to
Britain alone, but to the world.

The great church of the metropolis had been left untouched chiefly
because it had been arranged that, on the fall of London, the Tsar
was to be proclaimed Emperor of Asia under its dome, and at the same
time General le Gallifet was to assume the Dictatorship of France and
abolish the Republic, which for more than ten years had been the
plaything of unprincipled financiers, and the laughing-stock of
Europe. As the sun rose the great golden cross, rising high out of
the wilderness of houses, shone more and more brightly under the
brightening sky, and millions of eyes looked upon it from within the
city and from without with feelings far asunder as triumph and
defeat.

At daybreak the last meal had been eaten by the defenders of the
city. To supply it almost every animal left in London had been
sacrificed, and the last drop of liquor was drunk, even to the last
bottle of wine in the Royal cellars, which the King shared with his
two commanders-in-chief, Lord Roberts and Lord Wolseley, in the
presence of the troops on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. At nine
o'clock the King and Queen attended service in St. Paul's, and when
they left the Cathedral half an hour later the besiegers on the
heights were astounded to hear the bells of all the steeples left
standing in London ring out in a triumphant series of peals which
rippled away eastward and westward from St. Paul's and Westminster
Abbey, caught up and carried on by steeple after steeple, until from
Highgate to Dulwich, and from Hammersmith to Canning Town, the
beleaguered and starving city might have been celebrating some great
triumph or deliverance.

The astonished besiegers could only put the extraordinary
manifestation down to joy on the part of the citizens at the near
approaching end of the siege; but before the bells