expenses.  He can also require his tenants with their cattle to render services.  This system necessarily leads to much oppression and injustice.  It is also said that if a family is hard pressed by a Tu-muh and reduced to extreme poverty, they will make themselves over to him on condition that a portion of his land be given them to cultivate.  Such people are called caught slaves, as distinguished from hereditary, and the eldest children become the absolute property of the landlord and are generally given as attendants upon his wife and daughters.

“Every farmer owns a large number of slaves, who live in the same compound as himself.  These people do all the work of the farm, while the master employs himself as his fancy leads him.  Over these unfortunate people the owner has absolute control.  All their affairs are managed by him.  His girl slaves he marries off to other men’s slave boys, and similarly obtains wives for his male slaves.  The lot of these unfortunate people is hard beyond description.  Being considered but little more valuable than the cattle they tend, the food given to them is often inferior to the corn upon which the master’s horse is fed.  The cruel beatings and torturings they have been subject to have completely broken their spirit, and now they seem unable to exist apart from their masters.  Very seldom do any of them try to escape, for no one will give them shelter, and the punishment awarded a recaptured slave is so severe as to intimidate the most daring.  These poor folk are born in slavery, married in slavery, and they die in slavery.  It is not uncommon to meet with Chinese slaves, both boys and girls, in Nou-su families.  These have either been kidnapped and sold, or their parents, unable to nourish them, have bartered them in exchange for food.  Their purchasers marry them to Tu-su, and their lot is thrown in with the slave class.  One’s heart is wrung with anguish sometimes as he thinks of what cruelty and wretchedness exist among the hills of this benighted district.  Even here, however, light is beginning to shine, for some adherents of the Christian religion have changed their slaves into tenants, thus showing the way to the ultimate solution of this difficult problem.

“The life in a Nou-su household is not very complex.  The cattle are driven out early in the morning, as soon as the sun has risen.  They remain out until the breakfast hour, and then return to the stables and rest during the heat of the day, going out again in the cool hours.  The food of the household is prepared by the slaves, under the direction of the lady of the house.  There is no refined cooking, for the Nou-su despises well-cooked food, and complains that it never satisfies him.  He has a couplet which runs:  ’If you eat raw food, you become a warrior; if you eat it cooked, you suffer hunger.’  No chairs or tables are found in a genuine Nou-su house.  The food is served up in a large bowl placed on the floor.  The family sit around, and each one helps himself with