The long and persistent reports of Canton soldiers coming through Chenchow en route to the north to fight Wu Peifu have not proved true. They have all gone north through Kiangsi and we hear that in the first encounters they have been defeated. These reports have been verified by the quick movement of troops stationed here toward the; Kiangsi border. Our city is about as free from soldiers as it has been: for over four years.
The last and not yet completed piece of graft that the soldiery per-! formed was the selling of nearly 2,000 piculs of unhulled rice for an exorbitant price to the merchants of the city. This rice had been purchased down the river for the soldiers and conic after most of them had left for the Kiangsi fighting. They did not do the generous thing and sell it cheaply, or even at the current rate on the The writer, who has_ travelled extensively for nearly 20 years in this section and has seen some of the best mines of coal, tungsten, silver, lead, antimony, zinc and other metals, has often tried to anticipate the possibilities of anything like a proper development of these great deposits of ore. Recently it was my privilege to visit the fine bituminous coal mine about two miles from the Lei river. The ore here is equal in quality to the best bituminous coal produced anywhere in the world; this was-not my own observation, but an expert in ores told me that it was hard to beat, and that this one vein could be traced for 20 Chinese li. It was being worked, but almost at a loss, because of the lack of proper means of transportation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.