Changsha, June 29.
The city in settling down from the "military plague" has become a victim of the "water plague." The heavy rains have brought an unusually high river. It passed the record of 1914 by two inches, reaching 35ft. 7in. The 1906 was some 3ft. higher stil]. The suffering this year does not seem to have been anything like so intense as it was six years ago. No one seems this time to have camped out on the city wall, while then, there were hundreds who had to be fed as best they could. Then, the city police was under the government of a man who had learnt to be up to date in Japan; he expended quite a large sum on lime and other disinfectants and made the police visit every house and give them a lesson on cleanliness—a lesson, by the way, that as far as I could know from living in the midst of the flooded quarter, was by no means resented. The new government is hardly in the saddle, and can do nothing comparison with its predecessor' of 1914 (then under T'ang Siang-min). The rise this year was not so long continued as Jast time and the fall is going on as vapidly as the rise.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.