In the spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, or a new suit, or a car, or some other frivolity. Along the Tibetan border, it takes a different form. There the young braves polish up their rifles and spears and inaugurate the robbery season which causes much annoyance to traders and travellers along the caravan routes, and sometimes offends the local officials but very rarely judging by the indifference which these officials show, This is merely a prelude to an important discovery made among the large batch of letters received from the widely distributed correspondents of this journal the other day. Yen Chin, Hsikang province, Tibet, produced the only letter in which not a single reference to the Sino-Japanese hostilities was made, and up and down the Tibetan borderland the only topic of infor-motion was the robber activities resulting in the closure of some of the caravan routes. Of course, it should not be presumed that one topic overshadows the other for it is as serious a problem that robber activities should check trade in that part of the country as that a war of indefinite duration should check national trade, It is all a matter of relativity, but it does inspire the comforting thought that there is some part of China where they do not talk about the war and more or less normal life continues in which local affairs dominate although the topic may be unfortunately banditry.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.