Seenes at a Relief Distribution Centre in Chihli If you had stood with me a few days ago at the end of our utile village of Shangchialin and looked out over the great Chihli plains you would have seen little else but blinding clouds of snow whirling aeross.the vast level fields and obliterating all trace of road or path, writes the Rev. B. M. Me-Owan, Field Director of the Church of England branch of the Tientsin International Society for Famine Relief. A fierce gale was blowing from the north and the snow, frozen into hard particles of ice, stung the face almost like pellets from a gun. A more pitiless, desolate, helpless and hopeless scene i never saw.
And yet I was not alone, Staggering along, stumbling over the hidden stones, groping their way blindly through the driven snow, here and there a_ ghostly figure crept out of the wrack into the comparative shelter of the village street until a forlorn little crowd was gathered at our door. Surely as storm-tossed and desperate a group as ever one could see. Nor were they all men; women, old and young, were there. Covered with the storm-driven snow; shivering with the intense. cold; the old men with their beards clogged with ice, the women with their heads bound in cloth and their breath frozen thick around their faces. Some were so poorly clad that the wretched clothes they had could have offered but, little protection from the gale.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.