tune rains had fallen, and the
opium crop was good. More than anything else the district depends for
its prosperity upon the opium crop--if the crop is good, money is
plentiful. Maize-cobs last harvest were four times the size of those of
the previous harvest, when they were no larger than one's finger. Wheat
and beans were forward; the coming rice crop gave every hope of being a
good one. Food was still dear, and all prices were high, because rice
was scarce and dear, and it is the price of rice which regulates the
market. In a good year one sheng of rice (6-2/3lbs.) costs thirty-five
cash (less than one penny), it now costs 110 cash. The normal price of
maize is sixteen cash the sheng, it now cost sixty-five cash the sheng.
To make things worse, the weight of the sheng had been reduced with the
times from twelve catties to five catties, and at the same time the
relation of cash to silver had fallen from 1640 to 1250 cash the tael.

The selling of its female children into slavery is the chief sorrow of
this famine-stricken district. During last year it is estimated, or
rather, it is stated by the Chinese, that no less than three thousand
children from this neighbourhood, chiefly female children and a few
boys, were sold to dealers and carried like poultry in baskets to the
capital. At ordinary times the price for girls is one tael (three
shillings) for every year of their age, thus a girl of five costs
fifteen shillings, of ten, thirty shillings, but in time of famine
children, to speak brutally, become a drug in the market. Female
children were now offering at from three shillings and fourpence to six
shillings each. You could buy as many as you cared to, you might even
obtain them for nothing if you would enter into an agreement with the
father, which he had no means of enforcing, to take care of his child,
and clothe and feed her, and rear her kindly. Starving mothers would
come to the mission beseeching the foreign teachers to take their babies
and save them from the fate that was otherwise inevitable.

Girls are bought in Chaotong up to the age of twenty, and there is
always a ready market for those above the age of puberty; prices then
vary according to the measure of the girl's beauty, an important feature
being the smallness of her feet. They are sold in the capital for wives
and _yatows_; they are rarely sold into prostitution. Two important
factors in the demand for them are the large preponderance in the num