"Behind him march the halberdiers, Before him sound the drums!"
In the band there were men with long trumpets, such as those before which the walls of Jericho fell down. They blew, and men advanced through the gates of the city wall, built up of blue cotton, with white chalk marks; other men carried boards with titles; others came following after, and then stopped and stood in front of them, and so on, and so on; executioners with conical scarlet caps, boys with long Reeves' pheasant feathers in their caps, and all the curious insignia so well known in China, till at last there was a long line of them on either side all the way from the mock city wall to the tribune where the Viceroy was to sit, on one side of which was the Chinese bandstand, beside it again the box very politely set apart for foreigners, all hung with green reed-blinds to shield us from the people's stare.
[Illustration: SOLDIERS. _By Mrs. Bishop._]
Some of us really had been there since 5 a.m.; but not till about 9.30 did the trumpets sound. Then the great green Viceroy's chair with its multitude of bearers appeared through the city gates, forty banner-men all drooped their beautiful silken banners in the wet before him, whilst the army as one man went on its knees. The Viceroy entered the tribune, and the review began. But that entry could not have been better, if so well done, at Drury Lane. And the rest, too, was excellently staged. There was the usual extraordinary mixture of foreign and native drill,--fours about, hollow squares with the cavalry inside, the "thin red lines o' 'eroes," and volley-firing, with, in between, wonderful advances of the banner-men, shaking the long poles, round which their banners were rolled, and shouting defiance at the foe. Then in and out and round about darted the Tigers, in ochre-yellow cotton made almost in the foreign fashion, coatees cut short, and trousers not baggy, and tucked in at the boot, as it seemed, at first glance. Then they turned round, and revealed the tiger stripings on their backs and on their ochre-yellow hoods. They came on with long catlike strides, then leapt, then hid behind shields painted to represent the tiger's open jaws, then strode stealthily again, and went through many cotillion figures, their round painted shields sometimes forming a tent for all the tigers, sometimes a series of ladders. Then for a very long time men singly or in twos danced before the Viceroy, showing their skill with two-pronged forks made to catch the enemies' clothes, and rakes, and what in the end looked like a highly painted japanned table-top. Then suddenly, from opposite corners of the parade-ground, darted wild horsemen, each in fantastic attire and on a dashing pony, representing an attacking force of savages; and the army fired on every side at once. Then the artillery appeared with the most marvellous of cannon, slight and somewhat dragon-shaped, and muzzle-loading of course, requiring to be laboriously wheeled round after each volley, and resting on some strange, outlandish supports, that had puzzled us foreigners much whilst carried round upon the shoulders of what now proved to be the artillery.