Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/51

Frightful were the scenes witnessed by the British burial party among the houses and enclosures of the city, as group after group of whole families lying stiffened in their blood, within their own homestead, were discovered in the streets occupied by the Tartar troops and mandarins.... The bodies of most of the hapless little children who had fallen sacrifices to the enthusiasm and mad despair of their parents were found lying within the houses, and usually in the chambers of the women, as if each father had assembled the whole of his family before consummating the dreadful massacre; but many corpses of boys were lying in the streets, among those of horses and soldiers, as if an alarm had spread, and they had been stabbed while attempting to escape from their ruthless parents. In a few instances these poor little sufferers were found the morning after the assault, still breathing, the tide of life slowly ebbing away, as they lay writhing in the agony of a broken spine,—a mode of destruction so cruel that, but for the most certain evidence of its reality, it would not be believed. In one of the houses the bodies of seven dead and dying persons were found in one room, forming a group which for loathsome horror was perhaps unequalled. The house was evidently the abode of a man of some rank and consideration, and the delicate forms and features of the sufferers denoted them as belonging to the higher order of Tartars. On the floor, essaying in vain to put food with a spoon into the mouths of two young children extended on a mattress, writhing in the agonies of death caused by the dislocation of their spines, sat an old decrepit man, weeping bitterly as he listened to the piteous moans and convulsive breathings of the poor infants, while his eye wandered over the ghastly relics of mortality around him. On a bed near the dying children lay the body of a beautiful young woman, her limbs and ap-