The breezy days of Captain Marvyat aye recalled by a report from the Yangtze to-day that com= munists on the middle river have been shooting grape shot and nails out of miazale-loaders on the middle iver. The present generation knows nothing of grape shot except, perhaps, what it has gathered from the works of the novelist just. mone tioned, but at short range this, form of artillery might have been something distinctly unpleasant. Probably the muzzle loaders on the Yangtze can carry between 200 and 300 yards, and anybody getting in the way of a charge of grape—rusty cast-iron balls varying from half-an inch to an inch in diameter—wound be likely to find himself badly damaged. While. a steel helmet would be proof against them, the huge flesh wounds they would in-ict suggest something "infinitely Jess pleasant than the modern shatpnosed rifle bullet or that lineal successor of grape-shot, shrapnel, These guns up tiver were apparent-used on one day, bat on the next When a gunboat came to deal with them they had vanished, and there was nothing for the man-of-war to do but blow up the emplacements used. "This is unfortunate, as there is every reason to believe that, the mmazle-loaders will be brought into action elsewhere—unfortuntte also for an avademie reason, as to the modern gumer it would be of me tense interest to see how there wet Pons still manage to work
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.