only cold steel, across an area swept by machine guns. On October 21st, Generals Li and Hwang, with 15,000 ill-equipped rebels, won the battle of Kwang Shili in Hupeh against General Yin Tchang, the Manchu minister of war and commander-in-chief, with 20,000 finely equipped loyalists. Part of General Li’s force was a section of an army division which had gone over. Others of his new troops were recruited from the most famous boatmen of the world, the Szechuen trackers of the wild rapids and sublime gorges of the glorious Yangtze River, and from the indefatigable, cheerful mountain coolies of Hupeh province, who are as agile as a chamois. The propaganda of the rebels now bore fruit in rapid succession. On October 22nd the rebels, under the leadership of Tan Yen Kai, president of the Hunan Assembly, took Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. Yale College has a branch in this long forbidden city. Hunan has always been notable for honest, sturdy, independent men. It is the proudest province and the sternest in China. “What way Hunan goes, that way goes China.” It was the last province to permit missionary activity. Nanchang, the capital of Kiangsi province, the land of pottery, was taken on the same day, completing the occupation of the four adjoining central Yangtze provinces, which was all that Sun (Sunyacius) first planned to do, as a beginning and a basis on which to solicit foreign loans. It was rebellion indeed, and not a riot. The Tartars, Manchus and loyalists fled. New provincial governments were set up, each with a popular assembly. Peking was desperate, for China was almost split in half by the political earthquake. Peking felt sure that she held the north, however, with a well-equipped army of about twenty divisions. The reformers, however, had breathed into the ear of the troops, and pay was overdue in the impoverished condition of the central government. On October 24th, ancient Singan, the capital of the north-western province of Shensi, the original capital of China, where the empress dowager, Tse Hsi, fled in 1900, went over to the rebels, despite the threats of the bloody Mongol governor, General Sheng Yun. This really meant a fifth seceding province, as far as the populace was concerned. On the same day, Kowkiang on the Yangtze went over. Then Kweilin, the capital of Kwangsi province, went over on October 25th. This was the first of the southern provinces to join the movement openly. On October 25th noble Fuchau, the famous seaport capital of old Fukien province, went over, and we have already quoted a wonderful message to the white man from their “Sia Hwei” (reform association). On October 26th, Ngan-king, capital of Nganhwei province, declared for the rebels, and on the same day General Li was suggested as provisional president of the forming republic of Han, with six of China’s twenty-one provinces already seceding. Reform was as hot as a prairie fire, and almost as hard to manage.