The outraged gods, too, are on the side of the conservatives, as it is only right they should be, For six mouths we have had what the oldest foreign resident here never remembers to have seen in cloudy Szechuan, perpetual sunshine. The prolonged drought is very serious: the staple money-producing crop of Szechuan, the poppy, is a total failure; the plants flowered prematurely a month ago and are now mostly withered: for a hot spell started here on the 9th March last and, with one short break, we have had the thermometer in the nineties and eightic~ ever since. The bean crop is a failure and now the time for planting out the rice is fast approaching and there water. The Yangtze river has never been 60 low before for want of water. At the new rapid all junks, down as well as up, have to discharge their cargoes, leading to much delay and robbery, there being now little over a foot of water on the rocks over which the new rapid runs. These rocks the Customs commenced to remove in 1898, but unfortunately, as with ma other works of this service, the work was only commenced and has never been touched since. Meanwhile the cost of clearing a safe channel has been paid for over and over again in wrecks at this spot, let alone of life, which the Chinese officials of the excellent life beat service estimate at over a thousand a year!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.