(moat oun OWN CORRESPONDENT.)
The area of distress from floods in the province will evidently be very large during the coming winter, although in the im: ne-vicinity of Photing Fu the water subsided as.quickly.na at rose, falling eleven feet in twenty-four hours. "A little further east, however, most of the villages will be locked in the ice, accessible only on sledges "throughout the entire winter. Ona recent journey from Tientsin to Paoting Fu by river, during the first three days—more than 800 ti—only the merest shreds and patches of dry land were to be seen on any side. From either bank the view was always the same, water to the horizon, except where the expanse was broken by dykes, or disconsolate rows of trees, or island villages. In several cases the brick walls of hsien cities rose directly from the water on all sides, looking like the outer defences of some huge fort for harbour defence.
The villagers having their thoughts directed for the time being, from kaoliang and cabbages, have turned their attention to the reaping of the scaly harvest at their doors, and for more than a hundred miles, the banks, where they exist, are lined with'the Inrge four-cornered dip nets, which hover above the stream, rising and falling on its surface like a tow of abnormally developed: spiders. men and children join in the toward family support, As the daily catch averages from ten to fifty catties, the villagers who are fond of fish are not so badly off. The appearance of the villages, however, often with no more dry land than that on which the houses stand, is doleful in the extreme, especially when toward evening they are shrouded in the malarial vapour that rises from the stagnant water and trackless wastes of mud. At that hour of the day they serve perfectly to put one in mind of the wretchedness of Martin Chuzzlewit in his home in Eden on the Mississippi.
It is reported that the streets of the city are to be re-macadamized, presumably under the Viceroy's orders, like those of Tientsin. It would be an unspeakable improvement were this done, as a shower of rain or flurry of snow. is at present sufficient to throw them into the state of nastiness' familiar to all dwellers in Chinese cities. We can only hope that if the work is undertaken it will not prove the miserable fiasco in which the construction of the macadam road between Tientsin and Yangts'un has resulted. The material was laid down, but the passage of heavy carts over it before it had been properly rolled, has churned the last section of the road-bed into an al but impassable waste of loose earth and stones. The vice-regal eye has probably not rested upon it when in this condition, and therefore it remains convincing proof for all true Chinese, that the old ways were best.
Lath October.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.