barbarian heads are not even shaved. The _ta_--great or first
class--is also significant, because behind our own detested class
press two others deserving of almost equal contempt at the hands of
all believers in divine Boxerism. These are _ehr-mao-tzu_ and _san
mao-tzu_, second and third class coarse-haired ones. All good converts
belong to the second class, and death awaits them, our servants say;
while as to the third category, all having any sort of connection,
direct or indirect with the foreigner and his works are lumped
indiscriminately together in this one, and should be equally detested.
The small talk of the tea-shops now even says that officials having a
few sticks of European furniture in their houses are _san mao-tzu_. It
is very significant, too, this open talk in the tea-shops, because in
official Peking, the very centre of the enormous, loose-jointed
Empire, political gossip is severely disliked and the four characters,
"_mo t'an kuo shih_" (eschew political discussions), are skied in
every public room. People in the old days of last month heeded this
four-character warning, for a bambooing at the nearest police-station,
_ting erh_, was always a possibility. Now everyone can do as he
likes.

It is, therefore, becoming patent to the most blind that this is going
to be something startling, something eclipsing any other anti-foreign
movement ever heard of, because never before have the users of foreign
imports and the mere friends of foreigners been labelled in a class
just below that of the foreigners themselves. And then as it became
dark to-day, a fresh wave of excitement broke over the city and
produced almost a panic. The main body of Tung Fu-hsiang's savage
Kansu braves--that is, his whole army--re-entered the capital and
rapidly encamped on the open places in front of the Temples of Heaven
and Agriculture in the outer ring of Peking. This settled it, I am