The Hawaiian gazette., 1912-02-27

just as the green stalks were beginning =
to show above the ground, and the
floods once more swept away all hope.
Then the stolid farmer sat down and
gave up, or -chewed rice straw, green
with mould, or stuffed his children's
empty stomaches with the .slugs and
bugs and snails he managed to pick up
in the forgotten apIaces. Meanwhile
the floods continaed.i The bare sur
faces of the hills allowed the torrents
of train to drain down into the valley
without hindrance, the FLYER rose and
rose until in some places the fields were
covered ten feet deep with yellow
muddy water, in which cattle and
bloated bodies of men, women and chill
dren fioated.
Said one of the passengers of the
China, 81 went through the worse por-
tions of the Yangtse Valley not many
weeks after the floods began to abate.
The whole district was wilderness,
where it had once been fertile plain,
The little towns and villages were
deserted. In other small places the men
and women had gathered for company
in their unutterable misery.
Human Treadmill.
''Most pitiable of all the sights i
saw was the vain effort of these folk,
Harvesting themselves in human tread
mills and tramping the never ending
uphill round in an effort to clear the
levels of some of the water that was
denying them a chance at life. The
same floods filed up the canals and
rivers and made communication, except
over the sodden lands, impossible. In.
the province of Human, where the win
ter crops should have been well under
way, the land was soured with the
damp, the fields were nothing but lakes
of semiliquid mud. To the few isolated
knobs and hills where there was some-
green stuff growing, the winds carried
the pest of lice and these destroyed
what was left. The land was swept
bare. AS Sherman said over the valley
of the Shenandoah, ga crow would
have had to carry his provisions if he
few over it, Never have seen the
like, and i hope never to see anything
like it again.
"Driven by starvation the survivors
formed the socalled robber bands, which
from my own experience, know to be-
nothing more than hungry folk seeking
for something to eat, or the wherewith-
al to get it. On top of the anarchy
thus produced came the Manchu troops
l dare. not tell you, or if / did The AID.
vertiser would not print the things
those soldiers did to the starving peo-
pie. They murdered right and left with
the most devilish tortures, the men and
women and children they found in the
desolate homes. .t
"And the sights / saw. One 1 re-
member was an old woman, sitting with
gnarled and crooked hands, ash
smeared face and filthy rags, sitting by
the roadside near one of the gates at
Wuchang. Iemptied my pockets of the
loose change | had into her hands.
More. than an hour later / passed the
same place and she was still there,
+. dead, and the money in her. clutehed
fist. saw to it that she was buried
by the Red Cross. Another time saw
the body of mother, half eaten by
the ravensus dogs that swarmed every
where, and the remains of her baby,
hardly two weeks old, lying in the
graveyard outside Hankow. She had
evidently crawled there to die among
the tombs of her ancestors. 1t was no
uncommon sight to see a man, trotting
along on the road, in that peculiar
coolie trot we all know, stagger under
his burden, totter to the roadside, fall
and die of hunger. Those that lived
lived in the most loathsome shanties,
matched with sinking straw which
: they sometimes tried to eat and died
in, the trying. Sometimes even now I
can see again the dark, mummylike
2 faces, drawn and pinched With agony,
the clawlike hands raised or clutching
the earth in their pangs. The horror
!, of that trip win remain with mo al.
ways