in Taichou there still remain some of those desperado bullies -o avly depicted by Dr. Smith in his "Village Life," she tour years since, under the shelter of a foreign Uhureh, by their abominations provoked the people to rise against them, in the series of excesses attributed at the time to Ying Wen-te. Une of these, by mane, HFA, ately grown tire of the xestrai fron Very shine, upon hun by his spiritual gover"ors, hws returned to the particularly profitable' liv-li hood of forced loans upon unwilling guests, Ibis month, ho"ever, his horseplay his culminated in an incident which is exercising much the tongues of patricians and plebeians in town and county.
Neat a snail market town, seven miles from his home, there arose a petty dispute about the use to which a mow of Taoist show: be put, which had fallen vacant by death. The details are immaterial, but to clinch the matter, Mr. Desperate iff moroned wer some 80 or 49 of his minions all armed to the tevth, assembled some 100 or more roughs of the neighbourhood, and reinforced vy two boat-loads of men from a well-known brigand lo city, proceeded (in the name of his Church) to cust down the glove by destroying the rice evop of the mow of land. After a lapse of two or three days, no one having temerity to take up the glove, the warriors finding theasselves som vietod in commis:
lat, returned home with victorious exulia-
A few days later, that is, the 7th of June, w gentleman of the locality, with a friend, ingenuously passing through the town of the desperado, sat down to lunch a tavern, when their repast was rudely disturbed by' the onrush of our hero, with six or seven of his underlings and his father confessor, who seized them, severely maltreated them, relieved them of all their spare silver and carried the former in triumph to the Roman Catholic chapel at Luch'iao, where communications were set up priests at Haimen as to the possibility of a ransom of $300, to be distributed between the gallant captors and "Holy Feast Day Fund. The thing boded a complete success, when, alas! a party tions of the captured man an attack upon the: lately erected fortress-like walls of the Church), suddenly espied the desperado unattended on the street, Quick as thought they pounced upon him and spirited him away to the hills. This effected a transform tion. So zealous an adherent of the Holy Church must not be this tampered with. The Chihhsien, mindful of the years sin the province s still smarting, hastened to bring both men to the county town. ly fad he arrived home, how: wh there came letters cornu ators from the Roman Mi: n at Haimen which reqnestcal the release of their follower. Refusal staked his button, and he discharged both, The desperado, by a gang of his fends, returned home in semi-triumph, where, breathing out threatenings and slaughter with undiminished vigour, first acts were the seizure of one indivi. dual and the destruction of another's house.
"Such is the comedy: the moral is no Jess reareitable than shameful. Not only is a grave offence againat the common laws of the Iand compelled to go without even reprimand, but eyes can no longer ho closed to the fact that the district of Taichou (in the essentials) is as effectively under a papacy as England during the closing years of the fifteenth century. In
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.