Changsha, July 7.
'Things are not going quite as smoothly as the best wishers of the present authorities would like. Lack of recent news, due to telegraphic breakdown, is more than compensated with' all sorts of rumours. It is quite evident that Hunan is not entirely at one. Whether the party feuds will speedily heal up because confronted with fresh arrivals of northern soldiers, or whether, in the absence of immediate northern danger, the feuds grow and grow, it is difficult to say. At any rate, a good many soldiers have been sent back up river to Yungchowfu, where a recalcitrant Hunan general is acting against the common good.
Then, the excellent "buffer" provided at Changteh by the presence of General Feng hsiang has been taken away. Gen. Feng has moved across to Tsingshih, the busy town near Hohow in the strip of land between the northwest side of the Tungting Lake and the Yangtze. This leaves the way open for troops to come down the Yuan river. The western part of the province has been in isolation from all parts of the province for some time and it seems doubtful whether that part of the province will side with T'an Yen-kai or with the Yunnan-Kueichow faction on which they border. All this makes the people generally keenly sensitive to rumours as to what Wu Kuang-hsin is likely to do.
A heavy and prolonged thunderstorm beginning in the early hours of the day, long before dawn and continuing till after breakfast, has had the effect of causing a number of local blocks to the draining off of surface water and at some Points it has been necessary to negotiate a strip of the street in a riesha. Possibly, the recent flood has had an effect' on the drains that has partly blocked them and rendered them slower to get the water away.
A recent journey to the cast of the city for twenty miles showed that the crops as a whole are in good condition. The Liuyang river at one point burst its embankment to the destruction of the rice in some tens of acres. But even in those parts, the water was only on the fields about a week and the farmers are busy getting a fresh crop in preparation.
There is not much doing in general trade, as there is too little confidence in the permanence of the present regime.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.