June 4. None of the Boxers have been punished, and they have grown bolder, burning the next station below Fengtai, known as Huangtsun, thirteen miles from Peking, killing two Church of England missionaries named Robinson and Norman at Yungching, and defeating a force of Cossacks sent out from Tientsin to search for the surviving Belgians escaping from the Lu Han railway. In spite of this, and with seventeen men-of-war at Tangku, the foreign ministers, besides bringing up each a guard of fifty or seventy-five men to protect his own legation, are doing nothing—that we can see at any rate—to pacify the country. Why they don’t land a large force, come to Peking, and seize the old reprobates that they all know are the real bosses of the Boxer movement in Peking, and hold them responsible for any further movement, nobody knows. Every minister can tell you that Hsu Tung, Kang Yi, Chung Li, Chung Chi, and Chao Shu Chiao, with Prince Tuan, are the real causes of all the present disorder. Although they all know this, they still pretend to believe the assurances of the government to the contrary.... June 13. Events have been too exciting to allow of one sitting down quietly to write. The missionaries from Tungchow, thirteen miles south of Peking, have fled into this city, and all their college plant, private residences, and property have been destroyed by soldiers sent from the taotai’s yamen to protect them. All the Peking missionaries have gathered together in the Methodist mission compound, where, with such arms as they could collect—a few shotguns, rifles, and revolvers—and with a guard of twenty marines, sent by Mr. Conger, United States minister, they have fortified themselves with barbed wire and brick fences, and are “holding the fort.” For days we have heard no word from our Presbyterian missionaries at Paotingfu. The last word, now some days since, which came through the tsung-li-yamen and is therefore untrustworthy, was that they were safe at present. Wires south have been cut since the burning of the college buildings at Tungchow, and I have been unable to write home the developments daily occurring. On the 10th of June, just before the wires were cut, we had a message from United States Consul Ragsdale, saying eight hundred odd troops were coming to our assistance, but to-day is the fourth day since its receipt, and we only know of their reaching Lofa, a burned station on the railway to Tientsin, on Monday night. We have been expecting them every hour since, but no definite word of their arrival at any other place has reached us. Why they don’t send natives in advance we can’t imagine.