the
ground, and his hands tied behind, the thongs that bound them being
held by a man standing close in his rear. Thus disposed, he received a
tremendous flogging from a whip with a fearful heavy leathern lash,
which made me think of the Russian knout. The blows fell with a thud
that made my nerves shiver, and the back of the sufferer was covered
with blood, which was thrown here and there by the ensanguined
instrument of torture as it whistled through the air. He took his
punishment, however, to use the language of the P.R., like a man, and
though his body seemed to bend like a reed with each stroke, he never
uttered a sound that I could hear. I did not count the lashes, but
there was no stint in the allowance. Minute after minute the
castigator laboured away in his vocation, until finally the victim
collapsed, and rolling over, lay like a log in a pool of blood, and
was then carried off. I was rather surprised to see a whip used, as I
had always supposed the bastinado to be the favourite method of
flagellation in China. I asked Chung for an explanation, but he did
not seem to understand my question, and replied that the "one piecee
ting (soldier) no hab muchee hurtee," and that they might if they had
liked have cut off his "one piecee head." True it is that decapitation
is a very common punishment in the Chinese army.

Strongly as the massacre by the Japanese troops in Port Arthur is to
be condemned, there is not the slightest doubt in the world that the
Chinese brought it on themselves by their own vindictive savagery
towards their enemies. The attacking armies, advancing down the
Peninsula in touch with the fleet, were now within a day or two's
march of the inland forts. Bodies of Chinese troops harassed and
resisted them, and brushes between the opposing forces frequently took
place. The Chinese took some prisoners, whom they slew mercilessly,
and one of the first things I saw on the morning of the 19th was a
pair of corpses suspended by the feet from the branches of a huge
camphor tree near the parade-ground. They were hideously mutilated.
They had been disembowelled; the eyes were gouged out, the throat cut,
and the right hand severed. They were perfectly naked, and groups of
children were pelting them with mud and stones.

Similar ghastly spectacles were to be seen in other parts, both inside
the town and beyond it. Nor was this the worst; the walls exhibited
placards, in the sacred imperial yellow, inciting t