We left the Legation at seven A.M. in the trap of the United States Legation Guard, that being the only vehicle available large enough to carry the party, Mrs. Conger and her interpreter and myself and my painting materials, which included a large canvas and a folding easel. After leaving the City, the drive out to the Summer Palace is through fertile fields and a fair, smiling landscape. It had rained the night before and everything was beautifully fresh. The wet, stone-paved road stretched ahead like a shining stream; the wheat and corn fields along the road were of a brilliant green, with here and there the somber note of a clump of arbor-vitæ, out of which rose the walls of a temple! The distant hills, where lay the Summer Palace, were delicately limned against a soft blue-gray sky, and the whole made an entrancing picture. Soon after leaving Peking the mounted official Legation servants that followed Mrs. Conger’s carriage were joined by a Chinese Guard of Honor sent by the Wai-Wu-Pu (Foreign Office) to escort us to the Palace. After an hour and a half’s drive we rattled through a busy village, past the yellow ruins of a great lama temple, and along the park walls of the summer homes of several Princes of the Imperial Family, and soon came within sight of the beautiful grounds of the Summer Palace with its hills, valleys, canals, and lakes; the hills crowned with tea-houses and temples, the waters of the canals lapping the marble terraces of the Palaces. The red walls and glazed tiles of the yellow and green roofs, the brilliant foliage, freshened by the rain, made a gay picture; and the temples, arches, pagodas, and the many buildings that constitute a Chinese palace gave it the appearance of a whole town rather than of a single palace. As in all Oriental palaces, upon the very threshold of the outer courts sit the beggar, the lame, the halt, and the blind, gathering rich harvests from the generosity of the high nobles and officials and their myriad retainers as they pass in and out of the Foreign Office and the outer courts of the Palace. The Foreign Office, during the residence of the Court at the Summer Palace, sixteen miles from the Capital, has offices on the left of the great Imperial entrance, in order that state business may be more easily transacted while Their Majesties are in villeggiatura.