""Thus they raided the district said Mr. Ch'en,' until, in the 1th month, there was not one of more than a thousand villages in the district that had not been pillaged. We reckon that 5,300 people were slaughtered, 10,000 captives taken, 40,000 horses, donkeys and oxen carried off and numberless houses burned. Even the city was eaptured and though soldiers were sent they arrived after the raid was over, and, outside the walls, the robbers still move unmolested. For 300 years no such calamity has befallen the province. The people have no food. Their animals have all been stolen so that even if rain cornies ploughing is impossible, The people have nothing they can sell to buy food and, if they had, there is no one to buy, and, if it were possible to sell what does not exist, there is no grain to purchase with the proceeds? At this point the story teller broke down and wept and, we, though accustomed to these tales of sorrow, had to weep too, The above is tke ste-y of the spring and summer in the stricken district: The tale of the "autumn ran on October holies. is, If possible, still more tragic. The crops, sown in the dry fields, gave a sickly growth, but before the grain formed inthe car they wilted and locusts came and ate up the dry culm. The people grub up the roots of grasses and peel the bark off trees but dysentery strikes them down and, in their weak state, they die like fies,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.