In spite of all effort to light this sanctuary and to decorate it with lanterns in the form of flowers and birds, it is too freakish a place for a ball-room. It is impossible to light up the corners and the gilded arches of the ceiling, and the presiding goddess is so mysteriously pale as to be embarrassing with that smile of hers, which seems to pity the puerility of our Occidental hopping and skipping; her eyes are downcast, that she may not see. This feeling of embarrassment is not peculiar to myself, for the young woman who is leading the cotillon, seized by some sudden fancy, leaves the room, taking with her the tambourine she is using in the figure that has just begun, and is followed by both dancers and onlookers, so that the temple is emptied, and our poor little cotillon, languidly continued for a time in the open air, comes to an end under the cedars of the esplanade, where a few lanterns are still burning. * * * * * One o'clock in the morning. Most of the guests have departed, having far to go in the darkness before reaching their dwellings. A few of the particularly faithful among the "Allies" remain, it is true, around the buffet where the champagne continues to flow, and the toasts to France grow warmer and warmer. I was about to go off alone to my own palace, not far away, and was, in fact, already on the inclined plane leading to the Lake of the Lotus, when some one called out: "Wait for me; it will rest me to go along with you." It was Colonel Marchand, and we walked along together over the Marble Bridge. The great winding sheet of silence and of night has fallen upon the Imperial City that had been filled for a single evening with music and light. "Well," he questioned, "how did it go? what was your impression of it all?" And I replied as I felt,--that it was magnificently unusual, in a setting absolutely unparalleled. Yet my friend Marchand seems rather depressed, and we scarcely speak, except for the occasional word that suffices between friends. There was, for one thing, the feeling of melancholy that comes from the fading away into the past of an event--futile though it was--which had brought us a few days' distraction from the preoccupations of life; and more than all this, there was another feeling, common to us both, which we understood almost without words as our heels clicked on the marble pavement in the silence that from moment to moment grew more solemn. It seemed to us that this evening had commemorated in a way the irremediable downfall of Pekin, or rather the downfall of a people. Whatever happens now, even though the remarkable Asiatic court comes back here, which seems improbable, Pekin is over, its prestige gone, its mysteries are open to the light of day. Yet this Imperial City was one of the last refuges on earth of the marvellous and the unknown, one of the last bulwarks of a humanity so old as to be incomprehensible--nay, almost fabulous--to men of our times.