Then he and we two mids. had to do more waiting—it was terrible. The sun went down, it got dark quite suddenly, and we couldn’t help thinking of the awful road down the mountains to Los Angelos and how we were going to get down there at night. The Minister’s wife gave us some dinner and tried to be jolly, but I couldn’t be, and couldn’t eat anything. She and the girls were pretty nervous too, because, all the time we were pretending to have dinner, there were noises as if a riot was going on in the town. We were all fidgeting, and the black men-servants in their scarlet liveries were very jumpy. You could see by the way they moved about that they were frightened too. The Minister’s wife made them close the big windows and that drowned a good deal of the noise, and I couldn’t see the dark creepy shadows of the palms outside and felt less uncomfortable. She kept on saying, ’I wish your father would come back,’ and, just as we were going to have some coffee, we heard the banging of rifles. The black footman dropped his tray, and all of them simply trembled. It was no use to sit any longer at the table, the two girls began to cry, and then it was our turn to do something to help. The firing sometimes seemed to be coming our way, so we three went round the garden and made sure that all the gates were locked—a jolly creepy job it was out there in the dark, and I jumped every time I heard a rifle go off. The servants were all standing about, whispering and looking frightened, which made it all the more horrid; so, to give them something to do, we sent them to close all the shutters, though we couldn’t get them to go into the street to close some there, and had to do that ourselves. Then we made the three ladies come into the drawing-room, lighted all the lamps, and tried to cheer them up. The Angel played the piano, and Mr. Perkins, who hates singing, bellowed out some sea-songs and made them join in the choruses. That wasn’t much of a success, so he scratched his funny old head and did a few tricks. One was to stand straight upright and then sit down on the floor without bending his knees, and he did it so jolly well that it nearly shook the ornaments off the mantelpiece, and the bump frightened them all. Then he showed them how he could fall flat on his chest without bending his knees, and did it, but banged his chin hard on the polished floor, so that wasn’t quite a success either. We couldn’t think of any other tricks. Nine o’clock came, and ten o’clock—there was no firing now—and half-past ten came before we heard several carriages coming towards the house, and went out into the courtyard to the street gate. The Minister, the Captain, the tall German, who turned out to be the German Minister, and was in a grand-looking uniform, the little Frenchman, four or five others, and the United States Minister in ordinary evening dress, got down, and then several ladies, closely wrapped up, came in too.