the east and south entirely by the other Legations and linked
defences, it can run no risk from these quarters until the defenders
of these lines are beaten back by superior weight of numbers.
Partially protected on the west, owing to the fact that an immense
grass-grown park renders approach from this quarter without carefully
entrenching and barricading simple suicide, there remain but two
points of meagre dimensions at which the Chinese attack can be
successfully developed without much preliminary preparation; the
narrow northern end and a southwestern point formed by a regular
rabbit-warren of Chinese houses that push right up to the Legation
walls. It is precisely at these two points that the Chinese, with
their peculiar methods of attack, directed their best efforts.

Beginning in earnest at the northern end, after some inconsiderable
efforts on the southwestern corner, they set fire to the sacro-sanct
Hanlin Yuan, which is at once the Oxford and Cambridge, the Heidelberg
and the Sorbonne of the eighteen provinces of China rolled into one,
and is revered above all other earthly things by the Chinese scholar.
In the spacious halls of the Hanlin Academy, which back against the
flanking wall of the British Legation, are gathered in mighty piles
the literature and labours of the premier scholars of the Celestial
Empire. Here complete editions of Gargantuan compass; vast cyclopaedia
copied by hand and running into thousands of volumes; essays dating
from the time of dynasties now almost forgotten; woodblocks black with
age crowded the endless unvarnished shelves. In an empire where
scholarship has attained an untrammelled pedantry never dreamed of in
the remote West, in a country where a perfect knowledge of the
classics is respected by beggar and prince to such an extent that to
attempt to convey an idea would cause laughter in Europe, all of us
thought--even the pessimists--that it could never happen that this