From the streets very few buildings of any pretensions can be discerned, while from the dominating eminence of the city wall a sea of roofs monotonous in equality of height and greyness of colour meets the eye, which sameness is mostly due to the facts that but few upper storeys exist, and that the residences of the wealthy, besides being screened by high outer walls, are so blended with shops and hovels that it is difficult to discriminate them. In the heart of Peking, and surrounded by a twenty-foot wall coped with tiles glazed yellow and green, is the forbidden city, where the imperial palaces are grouped and from which Europeans were until recently jealously excluded. The city walls; a few temples in varying stages of magnificence, tawdriness and decay; the remains of sewers which, built of solid blocks of stone and large enough to admit a donkey, show that formerly a scheme of drainage and sanitation existed although to-day there is nothing of the kind; an insignificant canal and a hill rumoured to be made of coal heaped there as a supply in case of siege; and one has seen the architectural wonders of the capital. "Legation Quarter" prior to the Boxer troubles was but an indefinite area of the city in which the legations "happened" from time to time amongst a squalid entourage of native buildings, and connected one with another by means of impossible thoroughfares which passed for streets. A Russian diplomat once said to me that he considered Peking "dirty but nice," and this description exactly coincides with my own idea. This wasted body on a majestic frame carries one back with a single step to civilisation of a thousand years ago. Not the remnants displayed to tourists in Greece or Rome but the real thing, over which the Western spirit of change has as yet worked but little alteration. In this vast museum of antiquities one finds at every turn objects of engrossing interest, and personally it seemed to me that many of the scenes depicted in Prescott's enchanting book, _The Conquest of Mexico_, might almost as well have been laid in this far-famed capital of the North. Great antiquity, isolation from the Western world, pride of race and empire, veneration for their own colossal literature, arrested civilisation and profound contempt for all things foreign, create a picture rich in detail, very mournful in subject and marvellous in perspective. The means of getting about are by cart, on horseback or afoot, the sedan chair, which in other places furnishes the most comfortable conveyance, being here reserved for members of the Imperial family and for high officials both native and foreign.