Fiendish Massacre

A cold relish for cruelty and a quiet gusto for torture are not untypical of the Celestial race. Who has traversed China without seeing children play, unreproved, the game of cat tails. Two or more stray cats are caught, tied together by their extremities, hung over a convenient limb, and left to claw out each others' eyes and innards. Meanwhile the passing mandarin smiles and coolies stop to widen yellow grins. Thus loom the ingrained traits which made it possible, last week, for certain Chinese irregulars of heathen persuasion to massacre with fiendish cruelty the Roman Catholic natives who once populated Leiyang in Hunan Province.

Details were meagre and the murderous heathen were soon labeled by lazy correspondents with the rubber stamp "COMMUNISTS."

What seemed to have occurred was that several thousand rural bravos & marauders descended upon Leiyang to stage a good old-fashioned glut. Whole families were tortured until they told the whereabouts of valuables and gold. Dirty thumbs with ragged nails gouged out the eyes of stubborn misers or those who really had no gold. Finally surviving citizens of Leiyang were herded and penned into buildings which were lighted and burned amid awful outcries. The heathen, glutted to repletion, spread their grins and carried off their loot. Supplementary despatches confirmed that those burned & butchered numbered approximately 3,000.