Some years ago a Manchu official, high in command, espied a beautiful flower-girl on the street and forthwith attached her as his private property. So great was her fascination, the tables were turned and he became the slave--till he grew tired. He not only scorned her, but he deserted her. Though a Manchu maid, the Revolution played into her tapering fingers the opportunity for the sweetest revenge that ever tempted an almond-eyed beauty. It had been the proud boast of her officer master that he could resist any attacking party and hold the City Royal for the Manchus. Alas! he reckoned without a woman. She knew a man outside the city walls--a leader of an organization--half soldiery, half bandits--who thirsted for the chance to pay off countless scores against officers and private citizens inside. After a vain effort to win back her lover, the flower-girl communicated with the captain of the rebel band, who had only been deterred from entering the city by a high wall twenty feet thick. She told him to be ready to come in on a certain night--the gates would be open. The night came. She slipped from doorway to doorway through the guarded streets till she reached the appointed place. Even the sentries unconsciously lent a hand to her plan, in leaving their posts and seeking a tea-house fire by which to warm their half-frozen bodies. The one-time jewel of the harem, who had seldom lifted her own teacup, tugged at the mighty gates with her small hands till the bars were raised and in rushed the mob. She raced to her home, decked herself in all the splendid jewels he had given her, stuck red roses in her black hair, and stood on a high roof and jeered her lover as he fled for his life through the narrow streets. The city is bright with the fires started by the rabble. The yellow roofs, the pink walls and the towering marble pagodas catch the reflection of the flames, making a scene of barbaric splendor that would reduce the burning of Rome to a feeble little bonfire. The pitiful, the awful and the very funny are so intermixed, my face is fatally twisted trying to laugh and cry at the same time. Right across from my window, on the street curbing, a Chinaman is getting a hair-cut. In the midst of all the turmoil, hissing bullets and roaring mobs, he sits with folded hands and closed eyes as calm as a Joss, while a strolling barber manipulates a pair of foreign shears. For him blessed freedom lies not in the change of Monarchy to Republic, but in the shearing close to the scalp the hated badge of bondage--his pigtail. And, Mate, the first thing the looters do when they enter a house is to snatch down the telephones and take them out to burn; for, as one rakish bandit explained, they were the talking-machines of the foreign devils and, if left, might reveal the names of the looters!