Tachientu is having a very hot spell, the temperature in the shade noon being 78 degrees W. This is considered very hot for this border town and many are asking what it must be done on the Chentu Plain, some 7,000 feet below this place, The border and the province of Hsikang remain fairly quiet. Quite a few troops have left the frontier for the plains below.to take part in the usual summer campaign of mutual destruction.
Some years ago the average scholar or school-boy considered: t beneath him to chih-liang. It has now become the fashion and schoo! boys are leaving their desks before they have mastered the ordinary education and wander about the streets in the humble uniform of a budding officer. This at any time, in any clime spells disaster. tary Octopus 'The province, consciously or unconsciously, is' nursing a huge octopus which will some day give it a nasty pinch. At present it hus vicious tentacles with minor tentacles on each tentacle and every tentacle is busy crushing something or somebody. Crawling all over this huge octopus, and tickling it to facilitate its movement, is the young office-secking scholastic life fet the province. How the six big men can handle a million soldiers and feed a million students is not difficult to discover, They merely give them the figure and appearance of a large octopus and let it feed on others. The only safe place in Szechuan now is on the hard shellback of this huge octopus, and there is a terrific struggle to get there. A young man marries a wife and pulls her up on the back of the octopus; a merchant closes his business and crawls up on the back of the octopus; a schoolboy feels he has learned all he needs so springs up on the back of the octopus.
The 2,000,000 people now sitting tightly are shouting lustily to the 158,000,000 below, warning them of the danger from this creatures, tentacles. Occasionally someone slips from the back of the octopus and then he denounces the creature and its cruel and vicious tentacles.
However the man up has less to say than the man down. so the game goes on.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.