We have not been here long but my soul has been sickened by the sights of the pitiless consequences of even the rumors of war all over the country and particularly in Peking. If only the responsible ones could suffer. But it is the poor, the innocent and the old who pay the price for the greed of the others. In this, how akin the East is to the West! The night we came there was a run on the banks caused by the report that Peking was to be looted and burned. Crowds of men, women and even children, hollow-eyed and haggard, jammed the streets before the doors of the banks, pleading for their little all. Some of them had as much as two dollars stored away! But it was the twenty dimes that deferred slow starvation. Banks kept open through the night. Officials and clerks worked to exhaustion, satisfying demands, hoping to placate the mob and avert the unthinkable results of a riot. Countless soldiers swarmed the streets with fixed bayonets. But the bloodless witch has no claim to one single heart-beat of loyalty from the unpaid wretches who wear the Imperial uniform; and when by simply tying a white handkerchief on their arms they go over in groups of hundreds to the Revolutionists, they are only repaying treachery in its own foul coin. Though I hate to leave Jack even for an hour, I have to get out each day for some fresh air. To-day it seemed to me, as I walked among the crowds, fantastic in the flickering flames of bonfires and incandescent light, that life had done its cruel worst to these people--had written her bitterest tokens of suffering and woe in the deeply furrowed faces and sullenly hopeless eyes. Earlier in the year thousands of farmers and small tradesmen had come in from the country to escape floods, famine and robber-bands. Hundreds had sold their children for a dollar or so and for days lived on barks and leaves, as they staggered toward Peking for relief. Now thousands more are rushing from the city to the hills or to the desert, fleeing from riot and war, the strong carrying the sick, the young the old--each with a little bundle of household goods, all camping near the towering gates in the great city wall, ready to dash through when the keeper flings them open in the early morning. And through it all the merciless execution of any suspect or undesirable goes merrily on. Close by my carriage a cart passed. In it were four wretched creatures with hands and feet bound and pigtails tied together. They were on their way to a plot of crimson ground where hundreds part with their heads. By the side of the cart ran a ten-year-old boy, his uplifted face distorted with agony of grief. One of the prisoners was his father.