He showed me his rifle that he cherished with a care truly maternal, He patted it affectionately and dun air un peu malm he said with a touch of pride "Ca m'a tue trois Boches et deux Rouges!" At the same time he took considerable interest in meteorological and geograptical science, and all Sunday lunch-time we discussed French literature, He seemed to have read everything except Voltaire, That evening the hsien chang visi ed us. He was a_ slightly built Chinese of the old school, very formal and polite, with long aches, figure-eight style as the Chinese term them, but later, under the influence of his amazed interest in my description of a London "pea-souper" he relaxed, and we enjoyed quite spirited conversation.
That day he had had a man decapitated for killing another man for the sake of a bag of tsamba. This is still quite the practice in these parts, and even in Tachienlu, taking a little evening stroll, one must not be startled to see a malefactor's head hanging in a little cage in some prominent position by the city. gate.
The passage of the Reds in 1936 had scourged the country, Thousands of Tibetans and Chinese were slaughtered without mercy; every scrap of food was consumed by them, and, naturally, no crops were sown for the next year. It is not to be wondered at, then, that famine was in many parts rampant. Hence, doubtless, the shooting for the sake of a bag of barley flour. But worse news comes from further north, Unfortunately, news that I have every reason to believe entirely and wholly true: at Mongkong strangers have been killed and eaten; at Tanna and Hsinchin young children have been slain to feed their starving elders My information sources I naturally cannot give, but I cannot doubt the truth of this horrible state of offal
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.