'From Tientsin to Hsiao Chang is five days' journey. Three hours out from Tientsin we came upon some dogs feasting on a corpse lying at a cross-road. The dogs belonged to cottagers near, but no attempt was made by the owners to keep them away; no one took the trouble to bury the body or cover it up even. Later on we passed through one famine-devastated district. Half the houses in the villages were unroofed; large tracts of land were untilled; the landscape was almost entirely destitute of animal life; travellers were nowhere to be seen; round the villages the little stacks of straw and fuel were not to be seen; the lanes were silent; no dogs, no cocks and hens, no pigs; no groups of children playing or running after the foreigner as he passed by; and the words of Scripture came to my mind, "the land desolate without inhabitant." We continued to pass these desolations for about sixty English miles. We stopped a night in one of these ruined villages, and Mr. Lees took me round the place to see the nature and extent of the destruction. Closer inspection revealed even more ruin than a mere traveller's passing look would detect; for, evidently, some care had been taken to leave house walls and boundary walls on the street standing, so as to hide some part of the destruction, and thus make things look better than they really were. 'Natives of the place gave us numbers, which showed the population was then estimated at not much, if any, more than half the former population. It was expressly stated, however, that the missing half were not regarded as all dead; very many were dead, had died in the place, but many had gone elsewhere--in most cases no one knew where. Of these some few would doubtless return; but it is to be feared that the mortality in a hard year among famine refugees is very large, and of those who left their homes and native places, the few that may eventually return will be very few, I fear.