From Our Own Correspondent, Soochow, Aug. 16.
After an absence of more than a year, your correspondent finds quite a number of changes in this old city. The city lighting plant has been greatly improved, and there is perhaps an even greater improvement in the telephone service, the wires having been placed in large overhead cables, with other improvements in the central office. Two of the hospitals have been rebuilt, and another new hospital completed.
It is a relief to learn that the reports of an annual cholera season, that one has been hearing in the Japanese ports for the past two weeks, are greatly exaggerated. Here in Soochow the cholera does not seem to be claiming any more victims than is usually the case during August and September.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.