course they always stretched it out as far as possible in order to make the conversation interesting. The majority of the people living in Peking get all kinds of information through them. I have witnessed the same thing many a time during my stay at the Palace. One day during the time of Her Majesty's afternoon rest we heard a dreadful noise. It sounded just like the firing off of fire-crackers. Such a noise was quite unusual in the Palace for such things are not allowed to be brought into the Palace grounds. Of course Her Majesty woke up. In a few seconds time everyone became excited and were running to and fro as if the building was on fire. Her Majesty was giving orders and telling the eunuchs to be quiet, but no one listened to her and kept yelling and running around like crazy people, all talking at the same time. Her Majesty was furious and ordered us to bring the yellow bag to her. (I must explain about this bag. It was made of ordinary yellow cloth and contained bamboo sticks of all sorts and sizes and are made to beat the eunuchs, servant girls and old women servants with.) This bag was carried everywhere Her Majesty went, to be handy in case of emergency. Everyone of us knew where this bag was kept. We took all the sticks from the bag and Her Majesty ordered us to go to the courtyard and beat the eunuchs. It was such a funny sight to see all the Court ladies and servant girls each with a stick trying to separate the excited crowd. On my part I thought I was having good fun so I laughed and found the rest were laughing too. Her Majesty was standing on the veranda watching us but she was too far away to see well and with all that noise, we knew she could not hear us laughing. We tried our best to separate the crowd, but were laughing so much we did not have enough strength to hurt any of them. All of a sudden all the eunuchs became quiet and stopped talking, for one of them saw the head eunuch, Li Lien Ying, followed by all his attendants coming towards them. Everyone of them became frightened and stood there like statues. We stopped laughing, too, and turned back each with a stick in our hand, walking toward Her Majesty. Li Lien Ying was having a nap, too, and had heard the noise and had come to enquire what the trouble was and to report it to Her Majesty. It seemed one of the young eunuchs caught a crow. (The eunuchs hated crows, as they are considered an unlucky bird. The people in China called eunuchs crows because they were very disagreeable. That was the reason why the eunuchs hated them so.) They always set traps to catch them and then tied a huge fire-cracker to their legs, set fire to the cracker and then set the unfortunate birds free. Naturally the poor birds would be glad to fly away and by the time the powder exploded would be high up in the air and the poor bird would be blown to pieces. It seemed this was not the first time the eunuchs had played this cruel trick.