It was during the torrid period of the Chinese summer; it was often necessary to fight while dying of thirst, blinded by dust, under a sun as destructive as the balls, and with the constant sickening fear of infection from dead bodies. Yet a charming young woman was there with them,--an Austrian, to whom should be given one of our most beautiful French crosses. Alone amongst men in distress, she kept an even cheerfulness of the best kind, she cared for the wounded, prepared food for the sick sailors with her own hands, and then went off to aid in carrying bricks and sand for the barricades or to take her turn as watch on the roof. * * * * * Day by day the circle closed in upon the besieged as their ranks grew thinner and the garden filled with the dead; gradually they lost ground, although disputing with the enemy, who were legion, every piece of wall, every pile of bricks. And when one sees their little barricades hastily erected during the night out of nothing at all, and knows that five or six sailors succeeded in defending them (for five or six toward the end were all that could be spared), it really seems as though there were something supernatural about it all. As I walked through the garden with one of its defenders, and he said to me, "At the foot of that little wall we held out for so many days," and "In front of this little barricade we resisted for a week," it seemed a marvellous tale of heroism. And their last intrenchment! It was alongside the house,--a ditch dug tentatively in a single night, banked up with a few poor sacks of earth and sand; it was all they had to keep out the executioners, who, scarcely six metres away, were threatening them with death from the top of a wall. Beyond is the "cemetery," that is, the corner of the garden in which they buried their dead, until the still more terrible days when they had to put them here and there, concealing the place for fear the graves would be violated, in accordance with the terrible custom of this place. It was a poor little cemetery whose soil had been pressed and trampled upon in close combat, whose trees were shattered and broken by shell. The interments took place under Chinese fire, and an old white-headed priest--since a martyr, whose head was dragged in the gutter--said prayers at the grave, in spite of the balls that whistled about him, cutting and breaking the branches.