From a well-known Jewish merchant who recently arrived at Harbin from Kazan the "Russian Echo" has obtained some _particulars of life in the Volga district to-day. The merchant in question, who travelled with a contingent of German prisoners, relates that life in Kazan is dreadful and the picture seems more awful still because of a drought and a year of scarcity along the Volga, Kamo, Belaja, and parts of Western' Siberia. There is no fuel and over 800 wooden houses are about to be pulled down. Typhoid and other diseases claim a mass of victims. There are no physicians, no medicaments, while need and starvation are leading to suicide.
The "terror," after a spell of quietude during the summer, continues, The prisons are filled; hundreds of people are killed and murdered. To see one's friends is impossible. Either they are chased away from their homes, or need: and fright have obliged them to take refuge in other cities. To leave the town in a legal way is impossible as there are barricades on all the main roads, Instead of 30 steamers daily as in former times leaving Kazan to go up and down the Volga there is now only one.
AccorpINe to the "Siz"? the Japanese barracks on the eastern coast of Saghalien were reduced to ashes by fire on the 28th ultimo, The fire started from the furnace room of the wireless plant. No casualties occurred but, in the absence of any other buildings to accommodate the troops, they were obliged to live under canvas until the barrack were reconstructed,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.