During the day scores of _men may be seen sawing out huge squares of river ice for storing for summer. The ice pits are filled, while the temperature is 1 long below zero and then covered with a thick packing of straw, and unless there is an unusually great demand the supply of ice Jasts until the autumn.
Tee-cream and cold drinks, by no means clean or wholesome, are on sale during the summer. During the open season rafts of timber arrive from the upper reaches vf the Sungari and Kirin is one of the great distributing centres. The saw-mills are kept going night and day the whole year round, A_feature that strikes a visitor to Kirin is the piles of coffins stacked up for sale in the carpenters' yards by the river bank. Many of them are unpainted, but others are very brightly painted red and brown, with quai and ornate designs. All of them are thick and solid, the bottoms and lids are from three to five inches and made of one piece of wood.
The ice on the river does not break till the first or second week of April and the summer comes on us with a rush, giving us a very short spring.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.