The first reports that had come to New York were that fourfifths of the Chinese Christians and three-fourths of the boys and girls in the boarding-schools had been killed or had died under the awful hardships of that fatal summer. But as the months passed, first one and then another and another were found. Husbands searched for wives, parents for children, brothers for sisters, until a considerable number of the missing ones had been found, though the number of the lost was still great.

About two hundred of these surviving Christians and their families were living together in native buildings adjoining the residence in which we were entertained. Their history was one of agony and bereavement. Including those who fell at Paoting-fu, 191 of their fellow Christians had received the crown of martyrdom, so that almost every survivor had lost father or mother, brother or sister or friend. The Chinese are supposed to be a phlegmatic people and not given to emotion. But never have I met a congregation more swiftly responsive than this one in Peking as I bore to them kindly messages from many friends in other lands.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral was immortalized by Bishop Favier's defense during the memorable siege. The mission buildings occupy a spacious and strongly-walled compound in the Manchu city. Hundreds of bullet and shell holes in the roofs and walls were suggestive evidences of the fury of the Boxer attack, while great pits marked the spots where mines had been exploded.

I called on the famous Bishop. He was, for he has since died, a burly, heavily-bearded Frenchman of about sixty-five apparently. He received us most cordially and readily talked of the siege. He said that of the eighty Europeans and 3,400 Christians with him in the siege, 2,700 were women and children. Four hundred were buried, of whom forty were killed by bullets, twenty-five by one explosion, eighty-one by another and one by another. Of the rest, some died of disease but the greater part of starvation. Twenty-one children were buried

at one time in one grave. Beside these 400 who were killed or who died, many more were blown to pieces in explosions so that nothing could be found to bury. Fifty-one children disappeared in this way and not a fragment remained.

The first month of the siege, the food allowance was half a pound a day. The first half of the second month, it was reduced to four ounces, but for the second half only two ounces could be served and the people had to eat roots, bark and the leaves of trees and shrubs. Eighteen mules were eaten during the siege. The Bishop said that in the diocese outside of Peking, 6,000 Chinese Catholics, including three native priests, were killed by the Boxers. Only four European priests were killed, one in Peking and three outside. "Not one foreign priest left the diocese during the troubles," a statement that is equally true of the Presbyterian missionaries and, so far as I know, of those of other churches.

Clouds lowered as we left Peking, July 6th, on the Peking and Hankow Railway for Paoting-fu, that city of sacred and painful interest to every American Christian. Soon rain began to fall, and it steadily continued while we rode over the vast level plain, through unending fields of kao-liang, interspersed with plots of beans, peanuts, melons and cucumbers, and mud and brick-walled villages whose squalid wretchedness was hidden by the abundant foliage of the trees, which are the only beauty of Chinese cities. At almost every railway station, roofless buildings, crumbling walls and broken water tanks bore painful witness to the rage of the Boxers. At Liang-hsiang-hsien the first foreign property was destroyed, and all along the line outrages were perpetrated on the inoffensive native Christians. Nowhere else in China was the hatred of the foreigner more violent, for here hereditary pride and bigoted conservatism, unusually intense even for China, were reinforced by Boxer chiefs from the neighbouring province of Shantung, and were particularly irritated by the aggressiveness of Roman Catholic priests and by the construction of the railroad. It is only 110

miles from Peking to Paoting-fu. But the schedule was slow and the stops long, so that we were six hours in making the journey. Arriving at the large, well-built brick station, we bumped and splashed in a Chinese cart through narrow, muddy streets to the residence of a wealthy Chinese family that had deemed a hasty departure expedient when the French and British forces entered the city, and whose house had been assigned by the magistrate as temporary quarters for the Presbyterian missionaries.

Protestant mission work at Paoting-fu was begun only about thirty years ago by the American Board. The station was never a large one, the total nominal force of missionaries up to the Boxer outbreak being two ordained married men, Ewing and Pitkin, one physician, Dr. Noble, and two single women, the Misses Morrill and Gould. In the whole station field including the out-stations, there were not more than 300 Christians and those were south of a line drawn through the centre of the city of Paoting-fu. There were two boarding-schools, one for boys and one for girls, both small, and a general hospital.

The China Inland Mission had no mission work at Paoting-fu, but as the city is at the head of navigation of the Paoting-fu River from Tien-tsin and was also at that time the terminus of the Peking and Hankow Railway, the Mission made it a point of trans-shipment and of formation of cart and shendza trains for its extensive work in the Shan-si and Shen-si provinces, and kept a forwarding agent there, Mr. Benjamin Bagnall.

The Presbyterian station was not opened till 1893, and the force at the time of the outbreak consisted of three ordained men, the Revs. J. Walter Lowrie, J. A. Miller, and F. E. Simcox, two medical men, George Yardley Taylor and C. V. R. Hodge, and one single woman, Dr. Maud A. Mackay. All of the men except Lowrie and Taylor were married, and the former had his mother, Mrs. Amelia P. Lowrie, with him. With the exception of a dispensary and street chapel in rented