or millet to be exported in aid of the famine-stricken people. In consequence, our missionaries, who expended daily over 1,000 Taels, found their work of distribution encompassed by obstacles which, in spite of their most commendable endeavours, they have been unable to surmount.

But now the famine has reached its most fatal climax; there has been no rain for weeks, and the country inland is completely parched. Hard as our missionaries toil, while endeavouring to tide over this season and alleviate the acute sufferings of the needy, yet the hand of Death passes ever before them through the land, carrying away, with disease and hunger, thousands of weary souls who have prayed for succour in vain, and who now fall back before the eyes of our broad-hearted Christian labourers, who are compelled to bitterly acknowledge their inability to cope with the stupendous difficulties, and give the needed relief. This is owing to the nefarious practices of the Chinese officials, the inadequate amount of grain placed at their disposal, and the increasing demand from fugitives-men, women, and children, who eagerly crowd forward to be rescued from the grave.

Distracting accounts of almost incredible privation daily reach us through these refugees, forcibly revealing to us the awful ravages of this famine. It is reported and credited, especially by the Chinese, that numbers of poor wretches, reduced to the last painful extremities of starvation, and being both morally and physically unable to any longer withstand the biting pangs of hunger, have resorted to cannibalism; and others, whose children have been spared, now sell them for a mere trifle into brothels, where they will linger for a few years in iniquity and bondage, to find an early, unhonoured grave.

Some grotesque Chinese prints, vividly descriptive of the awful sufferings occasioned by the famine, were printed and widely circulated in the Shantung Province. (See Plates).

The resources for transportation inland are very limited, and a great portion of the relief mission is reluctantly entrusted to petty mandarins. Consequently much valuable time and money are irrevocably lost before the needed succour arrives at its destination. The China merchants' steamer, "Kwangchi," a small light-draft