a traverse to save you from the enfilading fire, which is coming from
heavens know where. The bullets were singing in all manner of tones
here as I ran, the iron ones of old-fashioned make muttering a deep
bass; the nickel-headed modern devils spitting the thinnest kind of
treble as they hastened along. It was almost amusing to gauge their
speed. Some had already travelled so far that with a flop which raises
a little cloud of dust they dropped exhausted at your feet. The
ricochets are in the majority, for with the vast number of intervening
walls and trees and the sloping Chinese roofs which pen us in on all
sides, the nickel, iron and lead of Mannlicher and Mauser rifles and
Tower muskets are soon converted into mere discordant humming-birds,
whose greatest inconvenience is their sound. Never have I heard such a
humming as these spent ricochets make.

Fifty feet past this southern stone bridge you meet the first Russian
barricade, with half a dozen tired Russian sailors sleeping on the
ground and a sleepy-eyed lookout man leaning on his rifle. This
barricade faces in both directions in the shape of a V, and under its
protection this part of Legation Street is supposed to be safe from a
rush, if the men stand firm. In the Russian and American Legations it
is everywhere the same story--barricades and loopholed houses and
outworks, now mostly crowned with sandbags, succeed one another with a
regularity which becomes monotonous. But on this western side the
bullets are few and far between as yet, and sometimes for a few
seconds a curious quiet reigns, only broken by the distant and
muffled hum of sound and crackling towards the east. Decidedly up to
date it is the Japanese and the French and their companions who have
all the honours in the matter of cannonading and fusillading, and the
Germans are soon going to be not far behind them. Right up on the
Tartar Wall I found the American marines once again lying mutinously