Yet it seemed vain, indeed, to talk of salvage with half the city in
flames, for other fires now began mysteriously in other places, which
"lighted" the horizon. "_Tout Pekin brule_," muttered a French sailor
to me as I passed back to my post, and his careless remark made me
think that this was the Commune and Sansculottism intermixed--the
ends of two centuries tumbled together--because we foreigners had
upset the equilibrium of the Far East with our importunities and our
covetousness of the Yellow Man's possessions....

And what of S----, what of the Peking Government--what is everybody in
the outside world doing--the distant world of which we have so
suddenly lost all trace, while we are passing through such times? We
do not know; we have no idea; we have almost forgotten to think about
it. S---- was heard of twice some days ago from Langfang, a station
only forty miles from Peking, but why he does not advance, why there
is this intolerable delay, we do not know. The Peking Government is
still decreeing and counter-decreeing night and day according to the
Government Gazettes. The Ministers of our eleven Legations are meeting
one another almost hourly, and are eternally discussing, but are doing
nothing else. We have blocked our roads with barricades and provided
our servants and dependents with passes written in English, French,
German, Italian, Russian and Chinese--so that everyone can
understand. We are now sick of such a multitude of languages and wish
all the world spoken Volapuk.

Thus with our rescued native Christians, our few butchered Boxers, our
score and more of fires lighting the whole of the horizon, here in the
middle of the night of the 16th of June we are no further forward in
our political situation than we were two and a half weeks ago, when