One scene was heart-breaking. An old Chinese woman--very, very old, perhaps a hundred years old--who could scarcely stand up, was going, God knows where, driven from her home, where a company of Germans had established themselves; she went away, dragging herself along with the help of two young lads who may have been her grandsons and who supported her as best they could, looking at her with infinite respect and tenderness. Seeming not to see us and looking as though she had nothing further to expect from any one, she passed slowly by, her poor face filled with despair, with supreme and irremediable distress, whilst the soldiers behind her were throwing away with shouts of laughter the unpretentious images from the altar of her ancestors. The beautiful sunshine of the autumn morning shone calmly on her well-cared-for little garden, blooming with zinnias and asters. The fort which fell to the lot of the French occupies almost the space of a town with all its dependencies, lodgings for mandarins and soldiers, electrical work-shops, stables, and powder magazines. In spite of the dragons that adorn the gates and in spite of the clawed monster painted on a stone slab in front of the entrance, it is constructed upon the most recent principles--plastered, casemated, and provided with Krupp guns of the latest models. Unfortunately for the Chinese, who had accumulated in the vicinity of Ning-Hia some terrifying defences,--mines, torpedoes, fougades, and intrenched camps,--nothing was finished, nothing completed anywhere; the movement against foreigners began six months too soon, before they had gotten into working order all the material Europe had sold to Li-Hung-Chang. A thousand Zouaves who are to arrive to-morrow are to occupy this fort during the winter; while awaiting their arrival we have simply brought along a score of sailors to take possession. It is curious to go among these houses, abandoned in haste and terror, and to find ourselves in the midst of the disorder of precipitate flight; broken furniture and dishes, clothing, guns, bayonets, ballistic books, boots with paper soles, umbrellas, and ambulance supplies are piled pell-mell before the doors. In the kitchens dishes of rice are ready for the oven, with plates of cabbage and cakes made of fried grasshoppers. There are shells everywhere, cartridges strew the grounds, gun-cotton is dangerously dispersed, and black powder is scattered in long trains. But side by side with this debauch of war materials, droll details attest the human side of Chinese life; on all the window-sills are pots of flowers, on all the walls are household gods placed there by the soldiers. The familiar sparrow abounds here, and is never interfered with, it seems, by the inhabitants of the place, and from the roofs the cats, circumspect but anxious to enter into relations with us, are observing the sort of _ménage_ that will be possible with such unexpected hosts as ourselves.