residence contained several large houses and some
fine trees and shrubs, but during the last seven years he has taken to
opium and has been steadily going down. He has been selling out this
residence, pulling down the houses and cutting down the trees, and selling
the wood and old bricks. He is now a beggar in the streets of Jen Tsuen.

"All through the hills west of Tai Yuan-fu the peasants are addicted to
the use of opium. About seventy per cent. of the population take opium in
one form or another. I was speaking to a number of them who had come into
an inn at which I was stopping. I asked them if they wanted to give up the
use of opium. They said yes, but that they had not the means to do so.
Everybody would like to give it up. The women smoke, as well as the men.

"The smoker does not trouble himself to plant seeds, nor to go out.

"The houses in Shansi are very good; in fact, they are better than in
other provinces, but they are rapidly going to ruin owing to the excessive
smoking of opium, and wherever one goes the ruins are seen on every side.
On the roads the people can get a little money by selling things, but off
the main roads the distress is worse than anywhere else.

"Up in the hills I stopped at a village and inquired if they had any food
for sale, and they told me that they had nothing but frozen potatoes. So I
asked to be shown those, and I went into one of the hovels and found
little potatoes, perhaps one-half an inch across, frozen, and all strewn
over the _kang_ (the brick bed), where they were drying. As soon as they
were dry, they were to be ground down into a meal of which dumplings were
made, and these were steamed. That was their only diet, and had been for
the past month. They had no money at all. What money they had possessed
had been spent on opium, and they could not expect anything to make up the
crop of potatoes the following autumn. I noticed in a basin a few dried
sticks, and I asked what they were for, and the man told me they were the
sticks taken from the sieve through which the opium was filtered for
purification. These sticks are soaked in hot water, and the water, which
contains a little opium, is drunk. They were using this in place of opium.
I gave this man twenty cents, and the next day when I returned he was
enjoying a pipe of opium.

"While passing through an iron-smelting village I noticed that the
blacksmiths who beat up the pig iron were regular living skeletons. They
wo