when I presented them with the act of renunciation of the Little Committee.
This night our sitting was taking place in the right wing of the immense administration building of the Chinese Eastern Railway close to the telegraph office, as we needed to communicate rapidly and without interruption with the other towns of the Far East, for we were under the pressure of liquidating at once all our affairs and were facing the necessity of working the whole night to accomplish this end. However, before dawn we were interrupted by the shouts and whistles of the night watchman. As we sprang to the windows and saw the glare of fire, we understood the cause of the commotion. We immediately made for the door, to learn the location of the blaze, but found to our surprise that it was barred on the outside. When we succeeded in breaking it open, a disheartening sight confronted us. Long tongues of flame were already spurting out with nasty hissing from under the eaves and around the window frames of the main section of the great building. Already the roar of gathering force was plainly audible, and dense clouds of smoke had begun to envelop the whole structure. As we reached the ground, it was too late to attempt to cross the big enclosed court, so that we had to go out by a side passage to the street at the north and make our way round to the Place before the great eastern façade, where a big crowd had gathered. All this immense office building, covering fully ten acres of ground, was everywhere ablaze, for simultaneous fires had evidently been set in many sections of it. As the avaricious fingers of flame began to tighten and crush the roof, the whole interior shone through the windows like the molten mass of a blast furnace.
Though the firemen and the sappers worked feverishly,
