One or two days have passed without my opening my diary, but they are very much like the days that I have already written about. The weather is very warm, but all able-bodied men are working desperately hard over trenches, bomb-proofs and barricades, or putting out more fires that have started at different places. Several attacks are constantly being made in opposite parts of our lines, with perhaps one big general attack in the afternoon and one during the night, which causes great excitement and sometimes great fear in everybody’s heart. Then comes more excitement when the rumour arrives that a big fire is breaking out in the French and American Legations, or we hear that someone, who has just come from one of these Legations, says that he has heard the officer say they probably cannot hold out much longer, with fire to fight as well as the Chinese, and in ten minutes the report is all over the compound that these Legations have been abandoned, and half of the soldiers defending them killed. Such a quantity of rumours that are circulating every day, only to be denied and proved untrue an hour later! It is incredible! In the case of the Legations who are still holding their own, it is very hard on the women whose husbands are still staying with the soldiers until they finally evacuate. These poor women naturally wonder, “What is my husband doing? Is he dead, and when they evacuate will he be amongst the lucky number to retire to the British compound alive?” Hard work is kept up on the important barricades, and men do hours and hours of manual labour. The women make thousands of sandbags daily, and help at the hospital, and make short rations go as far and look as attractive as possible under the circumstances. The only strong men in the compound who have no special work to do are Ministers Plenipotentiary. There is no head-work to be done now, and some of them don’t take kindly to physical work. The British Legation Library is a complete one, and occasionally some inquisitive soul will go to it and try to find, compared with other sieges and massacres, what place this one will have in history. The nearest similar harrowing siege seems to be that of Lucknow, where a heterogeneous multitude, closed up in the Residency, were holding out against fearful odds in expectation of relief by Havelock’s Highlanders, resolved to die of starvation rather than surrender, for in surrendering the fate of Cawnpore awaited them; and in thinking of these things we recollect that the Tartar rulers of China are of the same tribal family as the Great Mogul, who was the head of the Indian Sepoy Mutiny. But the King of Delhi was trying to regain his throne, whereas the Empress Dowager has no such excuse in making war on practically all the nations of the civilized world.