We have had in the past two weeks two seasonable rains that make the very full wheat crop promise most encouragingly and have also enabled the people to get in a full autumn crop. Despite this fact grain has advanced here recently something like 50 per cent., and the saddest fact about it is that the lowest grade of flour, which is used by perhaps seven-tenths of the people, is much higher in proportion than that which is used by the better class. This, too, when many people who have this lower grade to sell are getting rich at a great rate. There are individual families in this section who will make from $5,000 to $50,000 in excess of good ordinary sales of grain.
I was told three weeks ago in Rungching that there were still in that county for sale probably more than 2,000,000 (piculs?) of this cheaper grain and that the grain merchants were clearing 13 cash per catty on each catty they could get as far west as Kaifengfu. This is making it almost as hard on poor people here as it is in the real famine sections—worse in some ways, because these are receiving no free gifts. Just now we have offered food to any who would be willing to give a day's work for two catties of flour with three coppers extra for fuel, and we have nearly 200 and could have as many. the ds, if we could give them work. Many of these are from north Honan and Chihli. In the past few days many women have asked to be allowed to do this work too—dirt carrying—and two companies are really at work. Money has been given for this special purpose.
Soupiers ann Banpits.
I was in Lui'hsien a few days ago, the county just west of us, heard that 20 days ago n 25 li of the city 11 men, released soldiers, had made a great raid. In one place they burned over ICO Aten of houses and three persons, and robbed quite humber of towns, carrying off several persons, a young woman among them whom they seemed not to want by the time they reached Pochow, for they. left her, as report goes, at a temple. Just east of us about the same time a band of robbers came and retook an old man whom they had captured last year and who escaped. This time they decided to make sure of him and so killed him. In the Lui case the people said that the robbers went. back to Shantung to get more guns and ammunition from the Japanese and would return for more successful work.
Not a little opium will be blooming in this region in the next few weeks, unless somebody gets strict orders to destroy it. This is not very likely in the condition of things.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.