The Shropshire Examiner and all round the Wrekin advertiser. — 1876-11-24 (Wenlock, Shropshire, England)

LADY STRANGFORD'S EASTFRN MISSION.  The Lord Mayor of London has received a long letter from Lady Strangford, giving an acoount of her mission in the East. We give the following extracts:—" The Bulgarians had prepared a small but pleasant house for me, to which I was warmly welcomed, and where I was at once made as comfortably at home as possible. Nothing could exceed the kindness of my reception. The present misery is so appalling hero that it may well absorb me. It will be many years before the Bulgarian villages can be restored to the state they were in last April. Rich and poor villages are alike utterly destroyed, and nothing scarcely is to be seen but thousands of wretched, half-starved, shivering women and children, huddling under a few beards on the damp earth, among the blackened heaps of fallen walls. I went with a missionary to Batak. We rode six hours in torrents of rain up the mountain gorge. The place, cleared now of human remains, is yet a dreadful sight; nothing but heaps of blackened and burnt stones. The people are living in huts of a few loose boards laid together, or in shanties of straw, through which the wind and the rein passed freely. Mr. Clarke had got up at the cost of £250 a wooden building, for refuge and hospital, in which we slept, with blankets hung up to keep out the rain, which dripped through the unfinished roof, and the wind from the unglazed windows. IWe slept on sacks of straw. As I lay there sleepless and shivering with cold. I yet felt ashamed of the comparative comfort and warmth we were enjoying. In a village where we were the Turks and Bulgarians live happily together, and there had been no disturbance, but eight men and boys of the village had been murdered on the road at some distance. I was glad for once to see how evidence was gathered. As the poor woman who had /teen her son killed and another of the lads roasted on the fire rose to leave the room I said a few words of sympathy, and added my regret at having made her repeat so sad a story. She turned round on me with tears dropping down her Yaiktuak, and said, as she struck her breast with one hand. "The fire burns here, oh lady : by day and by night; why should I not speak of its burning? The pain is the same whether I speak or am silent." . . . But we want more and more money. Heaven knows how I feel for the privations of my own countrymen at home, and have seen something of suffering in England but if the poorest and worst off English peasant could see for himself the state of the best off here in these villages, I think we should soon have funds enough and to spare. For myself, I am ashamed of the clothes I wear, and of the blankets I sleep under ; and the food I eat chokes me when I think of what I have seen around me. Christmas will come soon, and the English will be gladdening the hearts of their own people in prosperous, happy England. Will they not spare something for the yet far poorer, suffering, sorrow-stricken, crusheddown creatures here in this country, which is as cold and colder than any fell or moor at home ? My Lord, I wish I could have written you a better account of this country and my work in it; but I can do no more now. I can only beg you to ask the merchants of the City of London to seod me £50,000. God knows how we need it here."