Last spring: the wheat and bar: ley. (except in a few cases of irrigated land) just dried up and disappeared. But the over-hope people were not over-munch couraged. This is a country of two crops per season, and good yams in June or even July assure an autumn crop of millet, sorghum, maize and beans. Alas, the periodic rains, for which we al-look in midsummer, have ut-failed—for the first time in living memory.
The last fading hope was that, ab least, a crop of quick-maturing buck-wheat might be secured after 2 late vain. But no rain has come, and that hope is now entirely gone. The result is that a realivation of their desperate position has swept over the people with startling suddenness. Already fodder for animals has given out in many places and donkeys, cows, mules, ete., are being offered for one-tenth of their norvial value. To drive them for 100 or 200 miles to the south of the Yellow River results in Jess. than one-fifth of their value being secured, as the markets there are glutted with thousands of animals being driven in from every northern road.
Fricut from But worse than to retain their animals is the fact that ole coramun: are practically foodless, having exhausted all their grain in the long months since the last crop was Thousands are. feeing towards Shansi province, which reports credit with the prospect of a crop. Every road swarms with the melancholy streams of hunger-pinched The Peking-Hankow Railway is generously allowing refugees to travel free on all south-bound trains to South Honan and Hupeh, and these are crowded chock-a-block with families having many
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.