JUST now China is again the field where dread calamities, signs of the coming end, are reaping their destructive harvest. A few years ago India was the land of the plague and the famine; and indeed India has not been wholly free from the bubonic plague since the outbreak of a dozen or fifteen years ago. In spite of sanitary science the dread visitants of plague and pestilence hold on their way. Not long ago Elder W. A. Westworth reported scenes in South China, where our work has been going on amid a devastating plague. Now reports come of famine in Western China, and of bubonic plague in North China. The center of the plague seems to be Harbin, Manchuria, the same Harbin from which our newly organized Russian church sent us their greetings last week of prayer. May the Lord protect and bless our brethren as they endeavor to work for him and for the perishing amid the perils of the last days. The press despatches from Harbin said last week:— Nearly six thousand bodies of victims of the plague have been burned or buried on the outskirts of Harbin. Of these forty-eight hundred were from the Chinese town, and a thousand from the Russian14quarter. Sixteen stacks of coffins and seven pits filled with bodies and oiled logs blazed outside the town yesterday. The mortality among the doctors and hospital attendants is high, considering the means taken for their protection. The sanitary authorities hope soon to test serum of their own manufacture from the Manchurian bacilli, as the foreign importations have proved ineffective. The happenings in Europe in the seventeenth century, when the black death swept through, are being repeated here. At first the Chinese defied medical officers, and kept their sick and dead hidden, in order to conduct the ancient funeral rites. Now it is brother against brother, father against son. Stricken ones are forced into the streets to starve or freeze or perish from the plague. Passers-by avoid them; but sometimes those engaged in sanitary work, masked and bandaged, reach them before they die, and cart them to the pest-house or their bodies to the funeral pires. Not infrequently an outcast is to be seen kneeling and making his last obeisance before the grave of an ancestor, in sight of a pile of bodies on which his is soon to lie.