We enter a street where our soldiers are employed at various kinds of work in the midst of heaps of rubbish. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses the wretched interiors are visible; everything is in fragments, broken, destroyed as though for pleasure. From the thick dust raised by the north wind and by our own footsteps rises an intolerable odor of the dead. For two months the rage for destruction, the frenzy for murder, has beset this unfortunate "City of Celestial Purity," invaded by the troops of eight or ten different countries. She felt the first shock of all these hereditary hatreds. First the Boxers came her way. Then the Japanese,--heroic little soldiers of whom I do not wish to speak ill, but who destroy and kill as barbarian armies were wont to do. Still less do I wish to speak ill of our friends, the Russians; but they have sent here their Cossack neighbors from Tartary, and half-Mongolian Siberians, all admirable under fire, but looking at war in the Asiatic fashion. Then there are the cruel cavalrymen of India sent by Great Britain. America has let loose her soldiers. And when, in the first desire for vengeance for Chinese cruelties, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French arrived, nothing was left intact. Our commander and his officers have improvised lodgings and offices in some of the larger Chinese houses, hastily repairing the roofs and walls. In strong contrast to the rudeness of these places are the sumptuous wood carvings and the tall Chinese vases found intact among the ruins. They promise me carriages and horses for to-morrow morning to be ready at sunrise on the bank near my junk. When all is settled there is about an hour of daylight left, so I wander about the ruins of the city with my armed followers, Osman, Renaud, and Chinese Toum. As one gets farther away from the quarters where our soldiers are, the horrors increase with the solitude and the silence.