* * * * *

I passed the night in half a dozen different places, assimilating all
there was to assimilate; gazing and noting the thousand things there
were to be seen and heard, and sleeping exactly three hours. Few
people would believe the extraordinary condition to which twelve hours
of chaos can reduce a large number of civilised people who have been
forced into an unnatural life. It is indeed extraordinary. Half the
Legations are abandoned, excepting for a few sailors; others are being
evacuated, and most people have even none of the necessities of life
with them. For instance, at eight o'clock I discovered that I had had
no breakfast, and on finding that it would be impossible for me to get
any for some hours, I forthwith became so ravenously hungry that I
determined I would steal some if necessary. What a position for a
budding diplomatist!

Fortunately I thought of the Hotel de Pekin before I had done anything
startling, and soon C----, the genial and energetic Swiss, who is the
master of this wonderful hostelry, had given me coffee. He told me
then to go into his private rooms, ransack the place and take what I
liked. I found I was not alone in his private apartments. Baron
R----, the Russian commandant, had just come in before me, and had
fallen asleep from sheer fatigue as he was in the act of eating
something. He looked so ridiculous lying in a chair with his mouth
wide open and his sword and revolver mixed up with the things he had
been eating, that I began laughing loudly, and, aroused by this sound,
two more men appeared suddenly--Marquis P----, the cousin of the
Italian _charge_, and K----, the Dutch Minister. What they were doing
there I did not inquire. The Dutch Minister was in a frightful rage at