Suddenly, in the midst of it, a great gun boomed out to the northeast. Another gun, and another. Then came a pause and the besieged listened eagerly, for their own walls felt no shock. Again came the bellow of cannon, nearer and heavier, repeated and repeated, and the roll of smoke and the rattling fusillade of bullet shots told that a battle was on. Outside the gates! An army come against Peking! The Army of Deliverance! They were here fighting for the Christians! Oh, the music of birds' song, of rippling waters, of gently pulsing zephyrs, the music of old cathedral chimes, of grandest orchestras--nothing of them all could sound so like to the music that the morning stars sang together as this deafening peal of cannon, this rippling rhythm of Krag rifles. With bursting hearts they waited and watched the great wall to the north. It is sixty feet high and fully as wide at its base, tapering to twenty-five feet across the top. Could the gates be stormed? Could this wall be shaken? From the highest points inside the Compound eager eyes scanned the northeast as the battle raged on with crash of shells and whir of bullets. Then down to the waiting ones came a message that seemed to fly to every ear in the besieged city, making men and women drop to the ground in a very ecstasy of joy. "They've run up the Stars and Stripes on the northeast wall!" The sword of the Lord and of Gideon was come again to Peking, as it came once long ago to the Valley of Jezreel. The Allied Armies broke camp early on the morning of August fourteen in the year of nineteen hundred. Six miles away stood the most impassable defense an army of the West might ever storm. Yet the twelve thousand men did not hesitate. With General Chaffee's troops in the front of the line they fought through fiercely skirmishing forces up to the hoary old city's gates, the Fourteenth United States Infantry leading the way. The American guns cleared the Chinese soldiery from the top of the walls, and the American cannon were in line ready to blow open the huge gates. "I want to know what's on the other side before I open up the gates," General Chaffee declared. So the command was given for a volunteer to scale the wall, to stand up a target for the Chinese rifles! To be blown to pieces by Chinese cannon! Yet the armies must know what awaited them. There must be no debouching into a death-trap for a wholesale massacre. Thaine Aydelot had cherished one hope since the twilight hour on the battlefield at Yang-Tsun--that when this day should come the American might lead the way through the Peking gates and be first to enter the strange old city. Not merely because he was an American patriot, but because to him the American soldiers with all their sins and follies of youth and military life were yet world missionaries.