The combinations of barricades here, there, and everywhere are glorious, especially on the Wall, and well they might be, as they are made out of the huge rocks that were used hundreds of years ago to pave this wonderful piece of masonry. To stand and look down from the Wall into the British compound makes one realize more than ever how delightfully easy it would be for the Chinese, if they ever manned this part of the Wall, to point their guns downward and annihilate us. Forgetting this possible picture, let me look down and tell you what I see on this beautiful, sunshiny August morning. Before me lies what we could naturally call the _terre du siège_, and comprises the Japanese, German, French, Russian, American, and British compounds, all of which have their flags flying somewhere, although in most cases the original Legation flag-poles have been shot down. Then comes as a pretty piece of colouring, in contrast to the sacked, burnt, and charred Chinese houses, all that remains of the Hôtel de Pékin, with its collection of flags of all nations flying in seeming defiance from the upper windows. Further up Legation Street one sees a dirty, tired-looking, slimy green canal, running parallel to the British Legation, with a strong and high barricade on the bridge that spans it, so that we still have communication with those Legations on the other side—namely, the Japanese, German, and French. Then between and around these oases of compounds one sees an occasional big tree which has escaped burning, and which makes the scene of desolation seem even more lonely and desolate. Hundreds of houses, half burnt, half broken up, and wholly uninhabitable, tell the story of how in those first horrible attacks at the beginning of the siege they were used by the Chinese as cover, and then looted and burnt. A stray dog of the large wolfish, mongrel type that is so common in Peking can be seen picking his way about from place to place with the queer look and walk that seem to mark carrion animals. [Illustration: A GATE INTO THE IMPERIAL CITY ] Standing in the same place, but looking westward, one sees such a picture of beauty as one could never imagine even in one’s most exquisite dreams—a song of green and gold, the fairyland palaces of the wicked old ogress, the Empress-Dowager, these ideal gold-topped pavilions, palaces, and pagodas rising out of a veritable sea of green, which quivers and shimmers in the warm summer sunlight. In the old days we were frankly told that it was dangerous to wander too near enchanted palaces, and if this warning had been remembered, Kings and Queens would not have sent their knights of diplomacy to live on the other side of the Wall of this mysterious “Forbidden Purple City.” It was always a hazardous thing to do, even in fairy stories, and it seems as if the tale of what happened to these misguided knights may finish in the regular good old way, “And they were eaten up and never seen any more.”