June 18. Eleven days we have been besieged in Legation street. Our little guard of four hundred and fifty marines and sailors of all nationalities have kept unceasing watch night and day, and are nearly exhausted. Eleven days ago we were told that an army was marching to our relief, and although they had only eight miles to come we have not yet seen them, nor do we know their whereabouts. We have nightly repelled attacks of Boxers and soldiers of the government, and have killed in sorties over two hundred of them; but we have millions about us, and unless relieved must soon succumb. Our messengers to the outside world have been captured and killed, and our desperate situation, while it may be guessed, cannot be truly known. With fifty men-of-war now at Taku we have to remain within our barricaded streets and witness the destruction of all the mission premises and private foreign residences on the outside. The American Board mission’s large property, the two large Catholic cathedrals known as the South cathedral and the East cathedral, the two compounds of the American Presbyterian mission, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel mission, the International Institute, and the London mission have all furnished magnificent conflagrations, which we have beheld without being able in any way to prevent. At each place the furious Boxers, aided by their soldier sympathizers, have murdered, with shocking mutilation, all the gatekeepers as well as any women and children in the neighborhood suspected of being Christians or foreign sympathizers. At the South cathedral the massacre was shocking; so much so that when some of the poor mutilated children came fleeing across the city, bringing the news of what was going on, a relief party was organized from our little force, consisting of twelve Russians, twelve American marines, and two civilians, W. N. Pethick and M. Duysberg, armed with shotguns, who, risking conflict with the Manchu troops, marched two miles from our barricades and, coming on the Boxers suddenly in the midst of the ruins, fired a number of volleys into them, killing over sixty, upon which the rest fled. They then collected the women and children hidden in the surrounding alleys, and marched them back to us, where they are for the present safe. I have just finished dressing the wounded head of a little girl ten years of age, who, in spite of a sword cut four inches long in the back of her head and two fractures of the outer table of the skull, walked all the way back here, leading a little sister of eight and a brother of four. As she patiently endured the stitching of the wound, she described to me the murder of her father and mother and the looting of her home. One old man of sixty carried his mother of eighty upon his back and brought her into temporary safety; but how long before we are all murdered we cannot say.