The following case is reported by the Governor of Kiangsi. On the death of a man named Chang in the Tung-hsiang district in Kiangsi, his wife after the usual period of mourning was betrothed to a neighbour called Chou, the father of her first husband negotiating the second marriage. Her second husband died without issue but left an adopted son named Chou Wen-ching, who continued to live in the house after the death of his father and was ordinarily a person of good behaviour. Last year, however, his mind became affected and he was subject to fits and mental delusion. As he had never proved very violent, his mother and the neighbours did not like to report the case to the authorities and have him placed in confinement. One day when returning from the market his mother found him ina field acting like raving madman, and tried to bring him home witl her. He knocked her down and strangled her before a farmer who was in an adjacent field could come to her assistance. After his arrest he gave incoherent answers to all the questions that were put to him, and the vacant stare on his face, no less than the paid beating of the pulse, furnished indications of the malady with which he was afflicted. He has been condemned to death by the slow and painful process for the murder of his adopted mother and the sentence will be carried into effect in the provincial capital, as the place where the offence was committed, though not 300 distant, is separated therefrom by unfordable streams. The punishment for not reporting lunatics to the authorities is the same as that of an accessory before the act in the case of murder, and all the neigh-ours in the present instance would have received 100 blows had they not been entitled to the benefit of the recent Amnesty.
13th September.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.