RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
side" than if we visited the country during a period of complete calm. Then there were wonderful tales of valuable "loot" which interested us. Not necessarily illegitimate loot, but curios and art treasures in the hands of Chinese themselves who were selling things at ridiculously low figures and, sometimes, with a fascinating air of great mystery. There is some allurement in the idea of bargaining for priceless porcelains, ivories, silks and Russian sables behind closed and double-locked doors, in the dark depths of some wretched Chinese hovel. Our Army officers who had helped to relieve Peking brought us stories of this kind of adventure, and I secretly hoped that we should be able to have just some such experience. But being the wives of American officials I thought likely we should be "taken care of" every hour of every twenty-four. And so we were.
We sailed to Shanghai and went from there straight to Peking, where we became the guests of Colonel and Mrs. Robertson, who had gone in with the American troops in the Allied Armies and were quartered in no less a place than the Temple of Heaven. The casual tourist looking now upon that glorious collection of ancestral shrines would find it difficult to believe that they once served as barracks for American soldiers. Most people who visit the Temple of Heaven find in it an atmosphere of peace and serenity such as is achieved by few structures in the world, and to have this deep calm invaded by business-like "foreign-devil" troops must have ruffled the spirits of the high gods. But the soldiers had to be quartered somewhere and this great, clean, tree-sheltered enclosure in the heart of the Chinese city offered ample space.
Mr. Conger was then our Minister to China, and after spending a few very busy days sightseeing we went to the Legation to visit him. The Legation quarter, which had been laid in ruins during the Boxer troubles, had not yet
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