There is little romance in rain.
The showers of April may appeal to the poet as well as the flowers of May; and Turner may depict a storm at sea as well as Corot a placid lake or a bent tree; but steady gains, leaden skies, settled mists, quagmire roads, unrelieved damp and impenetrable gloom are rarely the theme of the poet, and seldom the story of water-colours and oils.
I travelled in the north Hupeh, along the borders of Honan inthe course of a trudge of one 129 miles in point of distance and seven days in point of duration, I had leisure to reflect on the pitilessness, irresistibleness of sustained rain. Before I had covered 10 miles the wind blew cold and damp, the clouds rolled across the sky," the drizzle began to fall; and, had T been a believer in omens, I might have turned back, for the wind sweeping round my umbrella blew! it inside out.
Arriving at a busy mart I sought to buy, and failing to buy, borrowed a Chinese umbrella; a heavy uncomely structure of oilpaper, mounted on bamboo ribs, and erected on a bamboo rod—a clumsy, inconvenient contrivance, painted red, but as efficient as any gold-mouni ed, gold-chased umbrella from Oxford Street. in keeping off the rain. Within half a mile of this mart there is a cave in which the famous Shen Lung came into being, if local legend be true, some 3,000 years before Christ. I wondered that he did when it" rained. The drizzle became more continuous and steady. The wind swept round in gusts that put my bamboo umbrella out of action. But on I trudged, with a round of visits to pay, and a programme to observe. And when, at the end of 25 miles I lodged for the night in a ionely hamlet, I was wet through.
Tumne 1s Fauxe 1x tim Lax.
I was on the borders of the famine-land. As one travels north! front Hankow, on the Kin-Han Railway, one observes a gradual change in the face of the rice crops. At the outset the fields are golden, or covered with the stubble that tells of harvest home. But the golden shade passes into an unhealthy yellow, for there is no rice in the ear; and the unhealthy yellow turns into a dark, desolate hue, for the crops are blighted—and there is famine in the land. So, as I trudged northwards from the fields that bear to the fields that are blast. ed, I saw all the gradations of colour—gold, straw yellow, black—and was pained at heart' for the stoical, fatalistic people who looked starvation in the face.
0 wheat crops failed in May. The rice has failed in September. "The cotton is poor, deplorably poor.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.