When I was doing a job of war-corresponding in China, it was my misfortune to visit the town of Kiangyin, where the forte are, on the Yangtze. It was a desolate hole as I wandered through it, for there seemed to be only houses of mud while the streets resembled sewers. Of course that impression was probably exaggerated, beoauve 'a temperature of over 100 degrees in the shade, and a rather remote prospect of where to lay one's head for the night do not tend to show things in their rosiest garb, but to-day that is how the place strikes sprawled all over the wall, of 1698. Ts, start with, it had appeared nninhabited, but later we found that a hermit lived there, and'of him ye caught but a passing glimpse. On the "hok the place was yo "quiet and dead that it appeared almost to have been wholly deserted by ita people.
The Fear of Publicity.
Finally, when we settled down into our proper quarters, giving the hermitage the goby, we discovered the secret of the place. The village was old, but not sufficiently 8, to be antique. Every house, er almost every one, was of the self-contained order, and lay back from the main road, The buildings fronting the streets were for the most part barns, and narrow paved passages ran up to the houses.
Within the courtyards formed by this arrangement, the people for the part exist, and appear to avoid the highway as if with some inborn distrust of publicity. I have come to the conclusion that the age of the place has got on the nerves of the villagers, and as a result they conceal their doings as if it bad come to be second nature to do so.
My own abode is 10 years old, and its occupants are in keeping with ite age.
Memories of the Hun.
There ought to be a lot of history attached to such a place, for it is the kind of spot which would have offered rare facilities for murder in Well, here I am in France, and spot which vividly recalls Kiangyin to my mind. A couple of days ago we were shifted from what was our happy bunting-ground all last year, and brought to this abode of desolation. None of us believed that France could produce such a place, and for one I imagined that such were confined to poverty-stricken areas in the East, We had been for several hours in the train and then on top of that did a nine miles march to our new quarters. As we plodded over the country road, not a house was to be seen, and the only thing of life was a searchlight in the distance. days gone by. However, I have not been able to get back further than the Franco-Prussian War, and at that period the Prussians occupied it for six months. They came here again in 1914 but were promptly chased out, and I don't think it has since figured in despatches.
Buch a village could not exist tagged on to it, fend tha iantaialy without some startling anomaly
in this case is that we can buy the London papers of the morning before Still, every dey I expect to find this cut out, even to find that the rest of the army has forgotten about us.
If such @ thing should happen, I can see us rapidly becoming akin to the villagers.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.