![Transcription Center logo](/themes/custom/tc_theme/assets/image/logo.png)
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
52 most of the time, but quite sociable when food appeared on our balcony. There were plentiful odors ascending from the street below, which seemed not to bother them much, or else they were too lazy to descend to that level, preferring the first class rooms on the balcony. Here, in the afternoon, occurred the first serious anti-foreign incident which we have experienced. I was sitting out on the balcony working on some Chinese and Dorothy was resting in the room. Without warning, apparently from nowhere, two or three patriots suddenly appeared and one attacked Dorothy, so viciously that he wounded her and drew blood. I leaped up to put my pacifist principles into action in her defense, but I found to my dismay that she had already resorted to the use of brute force and the offender lay stretched at full length upon the bed, dead in a pool of blood. It would be more interesting to say that he was dead in a pool of his own blood, but such would not be the case, and since, I am writing a serious memoir and not a work of fiction I am compelled to state that it was not his blood but the blood he had lately stolen from my sleeping wife. We feared that the shedding of blood on both sides in this case might lead to further serious trouble, and though there was no time for the report to get abroad through the press the rumor traveled fast. Prepared to defend ourselves to the death we made our bed upon the floor after carefully searching room and bedding for concealed patriots who might continue to resent the foreign occupation. Believing the room to be clear we bolted the door, lighted several long sticks of incense, and, fortified by camphor and tea, lay down to sleep. The electric light we kept burning all night, and through the lattice work which formed the top three feet of the board partitions between rooms came all night long the ^[[insert]] click and clatter of [[/insert]] ma-chang pieces and the voices of the gamblers at work. Nevertheless we suffered several more attacks, but managed to repel them without serious loss. So callous are the usually excitable Chinese to attacks upon foreigners that the men in the next room paid not attention whatever to our struggles. Morning came at last, and our assailants retreated. We rose, washed, searched thoroughly for any signs of loiterers, and prepared to wait for another day.