Driven forth from the capital. the Boxers are making their way east t" Suining and Hochou, the lott-r a walled district city xbout forty miles distant, on the banks of the "Little" River. This news created a panic in Chungking and all business is practicall, at a standstill. The p-nition is by some regarded as serious. and the Consul has issued a circular requesting British subje 's, in the event of an cut-break in the city, to rally either in the Consula e compound, which is inside the walls, or upon tue gunbo ts moored acroas the river st Lun: menhio. Wa have two in port, the Kinsha and the the Woodcock which was on her way hither from Kiating has been arrested at Suifu, for the protection of foreign residents in that important centre. Suifu as it is popularly called, or Hsu-ichoufu, the name by which the place is officially known, derives its importance from its position at the junction of the north fork of the Yangtz", the Min, with [ths Kinsha, or main Yang'ze River, as foreign yengraphors call it who, unlike the Chinese, place length before navigability. Suifu is likewise the terminus of the main Tanderead into Yunnan vd Tungchuan, and the prospective starting-p-int of the French way to Tongking vid Yunnan province, Boxer Influence.
My own opinion is that the Boxers are nothing more than bands of half-armed rot rendere beld by the feeble opposition they have hitherto" encountered and by the secret sympathy of those min-darins and people who have not yet suffered from them. Add to this their reputation for invulnerability, and their spread over the country is easily accounted for. But that they should dare to attack a city like Chungking, with two foreign men-of-war moored beneath its wall, is to me beyond the bounds of possibility. It is, however, an indication of their influence that even the son of a high military official here should have told me the other day that bullets went clean through the budless of true Boxers without harming them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.