Excerpt from Round About My Peking Garden

Pehtang or Northern Cathedral, when intact, was but a fine church, built to replace that earlier Northern Cathedral to which the Dowager Empress had objected as overlooking her garden, and which was therefore just about to be ceded to her on the occasion of our previous visit. But now its facade riddled with shot, its aisles propped up by many beams, the trees behind with their bark gnawed off - one of the Sisters said by our mules, but higher surely than any mule could reach - the tumble-down masses of brick and mortar behind the broken walls, the great pits where the mines exploded, engulfing children by the hun dred, all recall memories of heroism and yet of suffering so long endured that the heart aches, the eyes brim over with tears, and one sees all things through a mist. There, says a young Portuguese Sister, her big brown eyes luminous with the recollec tion, there is where the Italian lieutenant was buried by a shell, and for three-quarters of an hour we could not dig him out. N 0, he was alive and only bruised. Ah! The young French lieutenant, that was sad! He was so good. We could but grieve over his loss.

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