A T'aiyuanfu opium dealer lately detormined. to increase Ins profits by buying the opium standing in the fields—n common custom—and gathering it for himself. Having regard to the number of youths with nothing in particular to do who infest T'niyuanfu and knowing the difficulty of getting Inbour at a moderate at Chiao Ch'eng, the opium-producing district, during the ingathering of the season's crops, he decided to engage a band of youths at Taiyuanfu to go with him to Chiao Ch'eng. This he did, securing the services in xll of ten, The party had got no further than the ford of the Fen river, seven or eight li distant from the capital, when they found the river was in flood and the bridge was gone, The dealer upon the whole party being This was objected. to, the other si ing that the deal eat had been concerned in fixing the price por head. At length the opium dealer thought of " clever plan for escaping the expense of paying 80 much. He scoured n rope, tied together the ten Inds and then got the man to exrry hin over, he himself taking the end of the rope so as to haul in the lads from the other side, But in the effort, three of the lads were knocked down and in struggling to rise pulled down several of the others. A freshet passing down at the moment swept the whole band away and forced the rope from the hands of the single man who alone had hold of it on the bank. When the dealer saw what had happened and reckoned up the hundreds of taels it would require to appease the parents and friends of those drowned, he decided that life was no longer possible to him, jumped into the flood and was himself drowned, 4th August.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.