whom I had the pleasure of meeting, and it is a lamentable fact that the prospect of receiving fivepence will tempt a mother to part with her babe.
The Amoy Hospital is, however, conducted on rather more liberal principles than that in Canton ; for if any one wishes to obtain a child, he may get one here free of charge, provided that he can deposit suitable credentials as to his own respect- ability. One of the resident Christian missionaries informed me that he felt convinced that 25 per cent of the female chil- dren of Amoy were destroyed at birth. The natives themselves make no secret of this crime, and I saw one old woman who confessed to having made away with three of her daughters in succession. They excuse their misdeeds on the ground of ex- treme poverty, and they certainly are poor and wretched to a degree I had no conception of before I visited their abodes. The district around is naturally barren and unproductive, and plundering raids of rebel and Imperial troops crippled the ener- gies of the needy inhabitants. War, it is true, has thinned the population, but not to such an extent as materially to affect its density.
An able-bodied man can here earn only fivepence a day, and skilled workmen, of whom there are many, are paid about eight- pence per diem. There is a great trade carried on in one quarter of the town, or rather in a suburb, in the collection and preparation of manure, which is afterwards sold to the farmers to fertilise their poor lands. The people who deal in this commodity dwell on the edge of the foul pits into which filth of all sorts is thrown, and for the use of the hovels in which they reside many of them pay about fivepence a month in rent. Close to this spot is a hill on which the poor are buried. There is no lack of recent graves, but all such are
