Ovr correspondents in Shantung, in their recent letters, have drawn a fearful picture of the state of affairs in that province, and in the districts over which the Yellow River poured its destructive flood last year. To the desolation, which the water brought on the land and peole,- pestilence has added its horrors.
hole families have died of a choleraic epidemic, and the destruction of life has been fearful, even if we adopt the lowest figares of half a million people given by our correspondent at Chi-nan-fu. The prevalence of cholera in that city and neighbourhood was noticed by our {correspondent early in September, the unhealthy month in China, but his advices did not point to any such virulence and fatality as his last letter shews to have fallen on the people. This is a very striking instance of the difficulty in obtaining information from and parts of the empire in which there are few or no resident foreigners, whose desire to know what is passing near them stimulates the sluggish na~ tives into communicating notable oscurtences. If there were this difficulty in obtaining information as to what was occurring in Chi-nan-fu itself, it would only be by casual intelligence that the very serious nature of the epidemic in the country would reach foreigners. The
except as regards markets at a distance, Chinese have no apatite for news, an improvement in which will put money in their pockets, and except where the native papers published here have correspondents, events such as this great: destruction of life in Shantung are slow of reaching the ears of foreigners. The sufferings of multitudes of people will be terrible during the winter, and to make things worse where food is scarce the mandarins in those parts where the harvest has been good have prohibited the export of grain. This has been ances among their own people and in done to avoid the possibility of disturb-
callous disregard of their suffering neighbours.
The effects of the deposit of immense quantities of sand in the country which was submerged last year are deplorable, One thing that makes the Yellow River different from all others is the immense deposits of loess through which it flows. There is a striking picture in Richthoven of a loess wall on the south bank of this river near the city of Hwai-ching Fu in Honan, and fifty miles west of the great gap which is now costing so much money to stop. The vertical wall represented in this picture is 500 feet high. The north bank is perfectly flat. Beside the earth cliff flows the stream in its winding course between little alternating capes of light brown mud. Deep gashes pierce the wall from top to bottom, for the loess deposits always exhibit the phenomenon of vertical cleavage. Here and there are seen boats on the river with single or double sails, Under shelter of the earth precipice nestles a house well protected by trees, The precipice is continued for many miles. The river is always undermine ing the precipice and will ultimately destroy it entirely. It gradually separates, for example, a mass of earth which underneath is from ten to fifteen feet thick and 150 feet long and above is 100 to 120 feet high. This gigantic lump will come down some day in a time of storm, when the "winds blow and crack their cheeks," and it will then lie prostrate in the river bed. The angry swelling river whenever there is a tempest renews its destructive activity on this mass of earth, and the whole is carried away piece-meal, to be spread over the fields of the farmer or help to make a sea-bottom hundreds of miles away. This direct assault made by the river on the mountain can only take place when the stream has, in the changes always slowly proceeding, made a point just in that locality, so that it can come rushing on nearly at right angles to the mountain.
To understand the relation between the Yellow River and the loess farther up between the provinces of Shensi and Shansi it is necessary to read what Richthoven says when describing those
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.