To-day, the New Year's Day is being observed with as much of the ritual and custom of old times as present finances permit. Official proclamations in large type and in plain stern terms have forbidden the observance of the day and proscribed crackers, red door-scrolls and other essential paraphernalia, but the whole community boldly defy the law, and even the local magistrate's fiat against the destruction of cypress trees for the purpose of worshipping Heaven and Earth has been defied. In this connexion is may be noted that, during the last two years, there has been considerable activity in re storing temples as a recrudescence of idol worship after the iconoclastic measures of the earlier years of the Republic. And the pendulum is still on the backward stroke!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.