"Oh! let me join the church!" he pleaded.
"What do you want to join the church for?" I asked.
"To save my life," he answered.
"But what is this all about?" I urged, raising him to his feet.
"You know the eunuch who came to you to buy books," he said.
I assured him that I knew him.
"Well," he continued, "I am a friend of his. The Empress Dowager has banished him, burned all the books he bought for the Emperor, and I am in danger of losing my head. Let me join the church, and thus save my life."
All I could do was to inform him that this was not the business of the church, and after further conversation he left and I never saw him again.
Day after day as the Emperor received the Peking Gazette on his lonely island he saw one after another of his coveted reforms vanish like mist before the pen of his august aunt. Nor was this all, for often the rescinding edicts appeared under his own name, and by the New Year, when he was brought forth to receive the foreign ministers accredited to his court, scarcely anything remained of all his reforms but the Peking University and the provincial and other schools. It is not to be wondered at therefore that he was reticent and despondent. What promises of good behaviour it was necessary for him to make before he was even allowed this much liberty, it is useless for us to conjecture.
Following this audience the Empress Dowager, who up to this time had been seen by no foreigner except Prince Henry of Prussia, decided to receive the wives of the foreign ministers. Her motives for this new move it is impossible to determine. It may have been to ascertain how the foreign governments would treat her who had been reported to have calmly ousted "their great and good friend the Emperor," to whom their ministers were accredited. Or it may have been that she hoped by this stroke of diplomacy to gain some measure of recognition as head of the government. She would at least see how she was regarded.