The result of this bitter feeling was the creation of a secret and patriotic society which concealed the nature of its propaganda under a name with a double {7} meaning. The Boxer Society was, as its name suggests, apparently an athletic society--a society which had for its object the encouragement of the art of self-defence. But the name had another signification. Its real object, as a Chinaman explained to me, was to "knock the heads of the foreigners off." It was a religious as well as a political movement, however. It had its prophets, who did wonders or were thought to do them, and its disciples were believed to be invulnerable to any Western weapon. It protested against the movement towards Western ideas, which it regarded as immoral; it condemned and destroyed everything Western, from straw hats and cigarettes to mission houses and railways; its disciples believed that the spirits that defend China were angry at the introduction of Western things, that they were withholding the rain so necessary to the light loess land of that district, and that the only way they could be propitiated was by the sacrifice of a Western life or by the destruction of a Western building. One of the things that precipitated the siege of Peking was the apparent success of such an action. In pursuance of their faith, the Boxers set a light to the rail-head station of the half-made Hankow-Peking railway, a place called Pao-ting-fu; the station was a mere wooden barrack, and blazed up merrily with an imposing column of smoke; hardly had the smoke reached the heavens, when the sky was overcast with heavy thunder-clouds, and in a short time the thirsty land received the long-wished-for rain, and the Boxer {8} prophets pointed with sinister effect to the heavenly confirmation of their doctrine.