Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/338

 deliverance came. Calmly he sat within his palace, looking with disdain upon the gathering forces that ere long were to strike the fatal blow. The city had not yet fallen into the hands of his foes, when his faith and fortitude forsook him, and he ended his days by his own hand.

It is a tedious journey round the city moat to the southern gate. Many boats were to be met winding their way along this canal, or else drawn up into groups and forming little market- places every here and there. At one small bridge beneath which we passed, it was told me that there, after the fall of Nanking, the canal had been dammed up by rebel heads. Outside the southern gate there is a large suburb. Why it should have been planted there, when there is so much vacant space within the walls, is difficult to tell. Many of its dwellings are nothing more than rude huts, erected over ground strewn with the graves and bones of Taipings and Imperialists mingled together in kindred dust. Here, too, I found the old porcelain tower of Nanking (once one of the seven wonders of the world, but now levelled to the earth) ; and a number of small speculators driving a trade in its porcelain bricks. But most of the bricks of this tower and of the " Monastery of Gratitude " to which it belonged, were used in constructing the Nanking arsenal close by ; and of the two edifices I should say that the latter, planted as it had been by Li-hung-chang, in the very heart of the ''Central Flowery Land," will be held to be far the more wonderful structure of the two. Here, then, the old Buddhist tower and the monastery with its monotonous chants, have been replaced by a temple dedicated to the Chinese Vulcan and Mars, whose altars are furnaces, whose worshippers are melters of iron, and from whose shrines come the never-ceasing rattle of machinery and the reports of rifles that are being tested for service.