(ax onicrNat stoR¥.) is a small village about 10 miles east of Tientsin. Winter binds up the vast ares of flooded land within its icy grasp and gives the surrounding country the appearance of a dull, grey plain, broken by dark patches here and there. These patches are clusters of comfortless mud hovels, built on raised ground and surrounded by a few bare fields which yield but meagre crops to the industrious peasants.
Ice-bound in the winter, the villagers earn a precarious liveli me work as sled men on the Northern River. Others brave the icy water and wearily dray their fishing nets under holes broken in the thick ice. A few.wander into Tientsin and strogsle with the hordes of ill-fed and overworked coolies for scanty food and miserable lodging. Their original sin was poverty, but the great city teaches them others which the unfortunate and starving sufferers find impossible to resist.
Ho Vi wasa young Chinese Ind, Racial cheerfulness and hard work in the open sir had given him a frame which wholesome food would have developed into sturt dines. He also drifted into Tientsin. Tempted by the offer of good pay he had presented himself at " recruiting shop and enlisted aga soldier to ght against the Jasod buy Gshiog-nota of his ons Tien path nese. ould save hin pay, he hoped, ger gains he could lift his mother and himself out of their poverty-stricken condition. That incompetent officials might lay up riches for themselves and continue to lead vicious and worthless lives, a few thousands such as Ho Yi were enrolled, robbed of food, pay and clothing, and rent to meet a foe whose very name caused the stay-at-home heroes to tremble and whininuly beg any and everyone to do that for them which they neither could do themselves nor even dared to attempt.
So Ho Yi was drafted off to Shanhaikuan, The older men, cheated out of their dues, robbed and bullied the younger and weaker ones. Three months spent amid the squalid vice and horror of a Chinese camp sent the lad back with the sick and wounded. He had neither seen nor encountered the enemy, but frost and exposure had forced him to crawl into the train of invalids. When they heard at Yithsing that Ho Yi had joined the army and returned sick to Tienisin, the neighbours jeered.
"No money and no food! The lad was a fool togo. The war is the Emperor's, let him look to it."
There was some-one, however, who cared for the peoriad. His mother longed to see her son again. She and her boy had been ts in a very small way. Their little held was narrow and bare. Their lot had been a hard one, but they had looked for none better.
Ho Yi was a good. son, obedient and hardworking, and always cheerful over his modest meals of millet and shredded cabbage.
'Meng Erh, a fellow-villager, returned to 'Yihsing in the spring, sick' and hardly healed of his wound..- He brought the news that Ho Yi was at Tientsin.
"The lad is better now," he said, "but thinner and always hungry and has sent his mother 500 cas Ho Vi had sent a silver dollar, but Meng Erh's. commission was heavy. "Meng Erh was returning the next day to the foreign hospital at Tientsin where he and Ho Yi had, he said, often been for medicine. If Ho Yi's mother wished to accompany him she must not be late as he would start at daylight without fail. She would not to bed that night, fearing that she might not be up early enough the next morning, but busied herself with the preparation of some food from her slender store. The neighbours laughed at her. Her son was a good son and had sent her 600 cash, but she need not make all this fuss and such a long journey to catch perhaps only a glimpse of him. Let her wait until hho came back to the village. She was his mother, however, and thought in her simple way that she did not mind what she undertook if she could only soe her son again very soon. The slippery ice and the hard uneven road proved a weary task for her crippled feet but her son was at the end of the toilsome journey. She would not even eat of the few coarse provisions in her bundle, for Ho Yi had always been a hungry boy.
At the hospital they told her that her son had not attended that day and might be in camp. The biting blast of the north east wind pierced her shivering body and 8 violent dust-storm had driven even the beggars to seek some rude shelter. But the poor woman plodded on until she had reached the camp below the city. At the camp they told her that peace would be made and Ho Yi be froe to retura with her. The labours of that day—the painful and wearisome journey, the frequent disappointments and the fatigue of her trombling limbs, were all as nothing to the joyful news that her son would be frey to return. Ho Yi was indeed free. Ho hud died that maining.
The price which China paid for the war was a heavy one, Part of it was paid by a poor, tired peasant woman, weeping in the darkness for her first-born.
Tov.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.