Show IlusLratedIIAS INDIAS AWFUL FAMINE India has been called a land of dreams I Is now a land of horrors as her people fight with plague andS sat and-S famine I IB no nightmare but a tcr y rlblo reality Thousands of onccHlrong men are now skin and bones with a s terrible gnawing of hunger within It I is a pitiable sight to see tall manly men HO terribly reduced as to ho hardly hard-ly able to wall yet somehow making their way somewhere to find food More pitiable are the women who with a keen sense of modesty are lighting wo manfully with their faslrottcning rags and their children emaciated fretful crying or too weak to cry adding add-ing to their terrible personal suffering from days of Insufficient food The bodies finding no nourishment turn Into those little skeletons that one can hold In ones hand Thousand of families like these haying hay-ing exhausted every possible resource fold and pawned the last article of their possession having lived somehow for a time on coarsest of wild fruits or roots or weeds anything to satisfy that awful craving that comes from days of starvation tramp many a long weary mile to find some Government or other relief There Is the scorching nun by day unusually scorching this yearthe pangs of thirst as well a hunger for every stream Is dry and when the sun goes down out In the open fields with nothing to cover them I they shiver all through the chilly night Where can human woes find anything v equal to this And this Is the story not 4 of one here and there but of thousands of ten of thousands and will be the sad story of hundreds of thousands Four months of the famine have passed months remain before the I monsoon bursts In June and brings its usual deluge of rain Other missionaries describe finding abandpned children IndyJng condition II I I whom they have been able to save or < failed to save because too ta no Tho familiar famine scenes are witnessed wit-nessed of famishing people following graincurts and struggling among themselves them-selves for the stray kernels that fall by the way Abandoned children are found subsisting on clods of earth and every possible thing that has nourishment In It filling up with water to drown tho gnawlngs of hunger and producing thoso painful monstrosities bodies bOcleR swollen out of all proportion but Ith sticks of legs and arms and 0 head that Is but a fiklncovored skull And tho babies grow weaker and weaker in their hungry cry or silenced by opium rapidly l turn to pitiable little skeletons that move with emotion the strongest emoton stronJcot heart that looks upon them What won der that n despairing mother unablo to endure the eight and tempted by her awn famishing body sells her little ono for n few handfuls of grain and when the famine Is over beats her breast in anguish for her little ono gone eho knows not where The vast camps are being filled The S anxiety and concern of Government and officials ale greatly on the strain All l departments of the administration na tlvo and otherwise are called upon to I exercise the o wisest caution and the ut most vigilance to see that none worthy I are neglected I neGlcctet and that those not ac i tually reduced to suffering take not the I place of the needy And it should be borne In mind that the prospect must grow gloomier for months to come up i to at least the beginning of the rains I m the month of June next The gravi ty of the situation needs to bo recog nised The Viceroy personally and the Government of India are giving their undivided attention to this which threatens to be a famine of the worst kind It la no wonder then that urgent appeals arc made by mlsslonarles to tho Christian people of this laud I would be a wonder If they did not Contributions for the relief fund should be sent to Treasurer F H Wig gin care of American Board of Foreign ForelSn Missions 11 Beacon street Boston who cables at short Intervals the amount available thereby affording immediate relief to the sufferers In India The Weekly Rev Justin E Abbott In Leslies I I |