THE HORRORS OF THE FAMINE.
A RECENT letter to the Independent, from a missionary in Pekin, gives the details of one of the most appalling catastrophes of modern times. This was the burning of a yard full of wood-sheds, in which were housed a great number of refugees from the famine regions, who were collected here to obtain a little food furnished by the government. It was on Sunday, Jan. 6, and the wind was from the north, and bitterly cold. On reaching the scene of the disaster, the missionary found the sheds already consumed and a multitude of bodies roasting within. He says:— “The poor victims must have been suffocated almost at once by the smoke and flames arising from the combustion of a foot or so of straw, upon which they slept, and which constituted their only means of keeping warm, aside from their own animal heat. The premises were surrounded by a strong stalk fence, plastered with mud, very difficult to break down. The fire broke out inside; but no one knows how, as no fire is allowed, except that in the little mud range, where the fuel on which the people are fed is cooked. It spread with astonishing rapidity, so that it was with difficulty that any escaped. The number within the enclosure appears to have been about two thousand eight hundred, and it is not certainly known how many were burned. The sight was the most horrible that could be imagined. A long row of sheds, quite consumed, mats above and straw beneath, and each packed full of hundreds of women and children, all burned to a cinder as they stood or squatted, before they had time to reach even the door. There were many very small children, scarcely three months old. It took three days to extricate all the bodies and get them coffined, and in many cases this was quite impossible.” The accounts from the Province of Shansi are horrible beyond the imagination of those who in distant lands only hear of famine. The stories in the Books of Kings about the famine are realized in that province.