Weihaiwei, Dec. 22—Up in the Weihaiwei hills complete silence reigns, for even the smallest birds have either gone away or moved down to the valleys for shelter: no longer can be heard the scream of the Swift, the twittering of the Swallows (now departed) or the little songs of Titmouse and Bunting the birds of prey have departed too for it is useless for them to sail above the bare hills where there is no longer any prey. Quite apart from the question of shelter, the food supply is gone for any form of animal life, and so I have the hills to myself. These hills present a somewhat dreary sight from below for the fuel gatherers have scraped them bare of every blade of grass; the only comfort is to remember that they have not taken the roots and that four or five months hence all will be green again: but from the crests a magnificent scene meets the eye: an outline of great rugged rocks and behind it all the deep blue sea which seems to rise upwards like the back-cloth of a stage scene with ships that sail along it sideways; above that again a border of pale blue sky painted with scudding clouds of cotton-wool. Down below on the seaboard a line of white breakers is dotted with screaming Gulls, while the black form of a Cormorant (or is it a Shag?) goes skimming across the clear water m search of its daily bread: and there, among the black rocks, tiny bent forms are crawling round like a small army of ants: these are the women and children chipping the oysters off the rocks-oysters which, if they were only left to grow, would rival those of Whitstable. But nothing can be allowed to grow amongst an impoverished population which must have warmth and food during the hard winter to come. It all amounts to a sort of "seorched"—or rather "scarred"—earth armies, policy which rivals that adopted by the local
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.