ntered it he
and Chung got on to the roof, where none of the Japanese thought of
looking for victims. His broken arm was causing him considerable
suffering, and having acquired during my knock-about life some rude
knowledge of surgery, I put the fracture together, and made a sling
with my neck-tie.

I explained my situation to Chung as well as I was able; he translated
to his countryman, who knew no English, and we held a council as to
future proceedings. The work of slaughter had apparently been
suspended; either the soldiers were tired of it or had been recalled.
The Japanese forces exceeded 20,000, and of these I do not think that
more than one half, perhaps not one third, were engaged in this first
evening's work, which was only the opening scene of the massacre.
Masses of the troops had been placed to occupy the forts, and
otherwise secure the conquest. We thought it likely, as indeed was the
case, that they would all withdraw to the camps outside as the night
advanced, and we resolved to attempt to gain the water-side, and seek
a last chance of escape, under cover of darkness. We searched the
place for food, but all we could find was a little bread, and a few
prepared sweetmeat cakes.

An awful stillness, broken at times by ominous sounds, came over the
town. Lights flitted at times through its dark labyrinths, by whom
borne it was impossible to perceive. The presence of death, in its
most fearful shapes, seemed palpable to the senses, and we, crouching
in the gloom on the roof, to which as the safest place we had
returned, had before our mental vision the mutilated bodies in the
rooms close below us, with the ghastly probability, almost the
certainty, that another hour or two would join us in their horrid
fate. To myself, the reckless, wasted past presented itself, in that
situation of appalling terrors, in all its enormity. There was I,
after throwing away the high advantages of fortune and prosperity, a
ruined and degraded man, about to meet an appropriate ending to such
a career by a bloody death at the hands of some brutal soldier, in an
unknown land, at the ends of the earth, where scarcely a human being
knew a word of my native tongue. If these pages should be read by any
young man embarking without a thought of the future, in the flush of
high spirits and inexperience, upon courses similar to mine, I hope he
will take warning, and stop in time.

It was, I should judge, about ten o'clock when at last we