returned, had before our mental vision the mutilated bodies in the
rooms close below us, with the ghastly probability, almost the
certainty, that another hour or two would join us in their horrid
fate. To myself, the reckless, wasted past presented itself, in that
situation of appalling terrors, in all its enormity. There was I,
after throwing away the high advantages of fortune and prosperity, a
ruined and degraded man, about to meet an appropriate ending to such
a career by a bloody death at the hands of some brutal soldier, in an
unknown land, at the ends of the earth, where scarcely a human being
knew a word of my native tongue. If these pages should be read by any
young man embarking without a thought of the future, in the flush of
high spirits and inexperience, upon courses similar to mine, I hope he
will take warning, and stop in time.

It was, I should judge, about ten o'clock when at last we descended to
the street. There had been no firing for about two hours. The lantern
was re-lit, and Chung, who knew the way best, took it and went ahead.
I still wore the soldier's dress; if met and challenged, I proposed to
make it appear, as best I could, that I was making the Chinamen
conduct me to one of the camps, or if I failed in this to sell my life
dearly with the rifle.

Our path lay right across the town, and the dead lay thickly in nearly
every street in the quarters we traversed, where, of every age, sex,
and condition, they had been promiscuously butchered by the hundred.
Here and there the miserable survivors--survivors only for the
present--were searching, with low wailings and lamentations, for those
they had lost, with the aid of their coloured lanterns, which gave a
look of indescribable ghastliness to the mutilated forms they bent
over to examine. To my last day I shall remember, with unfading