There was a rumour amongst local mandarins yesterday to the effect that one the Empress Dowager's Chief Councillors, the Grand Secretary, Hsii Tung, has been killed with his entire family in Peking by Boxers. Hsii Tung was a Chinese Bannerman, and was last January appointed Assistant Imperial Tutor to the Noir-Apparent. He was a most bigoted yeactionist and during the Emperor's Reform Government repeatedly asked leave to retire as he "could not bear to be an participant in the ruin of China, to which the Emperor and his advisers were rapidly driving her." 'The prayers to retire often refused by the Empress wer, ty whom they Were made, who consoled the old man with just wait and see." 'The massacre of Hsi Tung, who was over eighty-three yenrs old, and family ant retainers, numbering' over 300 souls, is stated to have occurred during the pillaging and burning of Peking towards the end of June, and is clear proof, as the local mandarins say, that the Boxers, like all who are in a stale of anarchy, do not know exactly what they are fighting for. In the meanwhile, in want of something definite, the Boxers go about pillaging and killing all who resist them—to keep "their hands in" as it were, in the absence hey could over ud yet save their skins, 10th July, 1
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.