Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/52

parel unchanged as if in sleep. She was cold and had been long dead. One arm clasped her neck, over which a silk scarf was thrown, to conceal the gash in her throat which had destroyed her life. Near her lay the corpse of a woman somewhat more advanced in years, stretched on a silk coverlet, her features distorted, and her eyes open and fixed, as if she had died by poison or strangulation.... A dead child stabbed through the neck lay near her; and in the narrow verandah adjoining the room, were the corpses of two more women suspended from the rafters by twisted cloths wound round their necks. They were both young—one quite a girl—and her features, in spite of the hideous distortion produced by the mode of her death, retained traces of their original beauty sufficient to show the lovely mould in which they had been cast. (Ouchterlony.)

For some time after the capture of the city the fate of the brave General Hailing, who had so nobly conducted its defence, was uncertain.... At length Mr. Morrison, the interpreter, discovered a man who had acted in the capacity of secretary to Hailing, secreted in an out-house of a building in the Tartar quarter, and from him he elicited the particulars of the fate of this gallant man. After haranguing his troops he had mounted his horse, and placing himself at their head, led them to the ground where their desperate attack upon the 18th and 49th regiments was made; thence,