The man paused a minute and licked his dry lips. To me there was something hideous in this story being told on that sacked street. His voice sounded a little like those Chinese trumpets, whose gurgling notes make one think instantly of evil things. Then he went on, more furiously than ever: "And the wells near the Eastern Gates, have you seen them, where all the women and girls have been jumping in? They are full of women and young girls--quite full, because they were afraid of the troops, especially of the black troops. The black troops become insane, the people say, when they see women. So the women killed themselves wherever they heard the guns. Now they are hauling up the dead bodies so that the wells will not be poisoned. I have seen them take six and seven bodies from the same well, all clinging together, and the men have tried to kill me because I looked. But I was well mounted; I could look as long as I liked, and then gallop away so fast that not even their shots could catch me. The place is full of dead people, nothing but dead people everywhere, and more are dying every minute." Then he came up to me and whispered how soldiers were behaving after they had outraged women. It was impossible to listen. He said that our own inhuman soldiery had invited him to stay and see. Yet although I swore at the man and told him to go away, I could not drive him from me. He wanted to talk and he had found some one who had to listen. Indeed, he clung to me all the way home, as if he had been at length frightened by his own stories and by his imagination. Steadily he became more and more curious. He watched me eat, he watched me drink, but he would take nothing himself. He wanted to go out again. He must have movement, he said, and he insisted on riding to Monseigneur F----'s Pei-t'ang Cathedral. He had not been there yet, and a curiosity suddenly seized him to see the place where others had suffered in the same way as ourselves. That reminded me, too, that everybody had almost forgotten about this Roman Catholic cathedral, forgotten completely because they were now at their ease. It had been two whole days before troops were even sent there to see that all was well, and even these only went because a priest had been killed half way between the Legations and the Cathedral. I decided to go, too. It was almost a duty to make this pilgrimage. So we quickly left again.