The animation of these ruins, accidentally peopled by joyous soldiers, is singular, unique, on this Sunday, which is a holiday in camp and barracks. In the long streets filled with wreckage of all kinds, Zouaves and African chasseurs, arm-in-arm with Germans in pointed helmets, pass gaily between the walls of roofless houses. There are little Japanese soldiers, shining and automatic, Russians with flat caps, plumed Bersaglieri, Austrians, Americans with big felt hats, and Indian cavalrymen with enormous turbans. All the flags of Europe are floating over the ruins of Tien-Tsin, which has been partitioned by the allied armies. In certain quarters the Chinese who have gradually returned, after their flight, have established bazars in the open air in the lovely sunshine of this autumn Sunday,--bazars where in the midst of incendiary ashes they sell to the soldiers articles picked up in the ruins, porcelains, jars, silk dresses, furs. There are so many of these soldiers, so many uniforms of every kind on our route, so many sentinels presenting arms, that we grow weary returning the many salutes received as we pass through this unheard-of babel. At the farther side of the destroyed city, near the high ramparts in front of the palace of the viceroy, where we are going to see the goddesses, some Chinese, undergoing torture in a kind of pillory, are lined up along the wall, with inscriptions above them describing their offences. Two pickets guard the doors with bayonetted guns, one an American, the other a Japanese, standing alongside of the horrible grinning old stone monsters who watch, crouching, on either side of the entrance. There is nothing sumptuous, nothing great in this dusty, decrepit palace which we have traversed unheeding, but it speaks of real China, of old China, grimacing and hostile. There is a profusion of monsters in marble, in broken faience, and in worm-eaten wood, falling to pieces from sheer old age or threatening from the edges of roofs to do so; frightful forms half buried in sand and ashes, with horns, claws, forked tongues, and big squinting eyes. In the grim walled court a few late roses are still in blossom under trees a century old. Now, after various turns along badly lighted passages, we reach the goddesses' door,--the one marked with two big red letters. The old Chinese woman, ever mute and mysterious, with head held high but with lifeless eyes persistently downcast, pushes open the black doors, with a gesture of submission which means: "Here they are, look at them!"