_December 18th._--This does not promise to be a lively sojourn. We are anchored at present at a point where the river forks into the Whampoa and Blenheim reaches. We have the Blenheim reach, and my suite wish me to go up it to the Macao Fort, from which they think they would have a good view of what goes on when the city is attacked. I wish, however, to be with Gros, and he will go up the Whampoa reach as far as his great lumbering ship will go. Meanwhile we are here confined to our ships, as it would not of course do for me to go on shore to be caught. Poor Yeh would think me worth having at present. What will he do? His answer is very weak, and reads as if the writer was at his wits' end; but with that sort of stupid Chinese policy which consists in never yielding anything, he exposes himself to the worst consequences without making any preparations (so far as we can see) for resistance. Among other things in his letter he quotes a long extract from a Hong-kong paper describing Sir G. Bonham's investiture as K.C.B., and advises me to imitate him for my own interest, rather than Sir J. Davis, who was recalled. Davis, says Yeh, insisted on getting into the city, and Bonham gave up this demand. Hence his advice to me. All through the letter is sheer twaddle. [Sidenote: Advance on Canton.] _December 22nd._--On the afternoon of the 20th, I got into a gunboat with Commodore Elliot, and went a short way up towards the barrier forts, which were last winter destroyed by the Americans. When we reached this point, all was so quiet that we determined to go on, and we actually steamed past the city of Canton, along the whole front, within pistol-shot of the town. A line of English men-of-war are now anchored there in front of the town. I never felt so ashamed of myself in my life, and Elliot remarked that the trip seemed to have made me sad. There we were, accumulating the means of destruction under the very eyes, and within the reach, of a population of about 1,000,000 people, against whom these means of destruction were to be employed! 'Yes,' I said to Elliot, 'I am sad, because when I look at that town, I feel that I am earning for myself a place in the Litany, immediately after "plague, pestilence, and famine."' I believe however that, as far as I am concerned, it was impossible for me to do otherwise than as I have done. I could not have abandoned the demand to enter the city after what happened last winter, without compromising our position in China altogether, and opening the way to calamities even greater than those now before us. I made my demands on Yeh as moderate as I could, so as to give him a chance of accepting; although, if he had accepted, I knew that I should have brought on my head the imprecations both of the navy and army and of the civilians, the time