D Liu, the farmer, sat! at the door of his one-room house. It was a warm evening in late February, and in his thin body he felt the coming of spring How he knew that the time had now come when life began to move in the soil? He could not have told himself. Most of al l , in a n y other year than this he might have pointed to his wheat fields where he panted wheat in the winter when he land was not needed for rice and where, when spring was moving into summer, he p l a n ted the good rice for rice was his chief crop. Bu the land told nothing his year. There was no wheat on it, for the flood had covered it long after wheat should have been planted, and it lay there cracked and like clay but newly dried. Well, on such a day as this, if he had his buffalo ( 水牛 ) and his plow ( 犁 ) as he had always had in other years, he would have gone out and plowed up that cracked soil. He ached to plow it up and make it look like a field again, yes, even though he had not so much as one seed to put in it. But he had no buffalo. If anyone had told him that he would eat his own water buffalo that plowed the good land to him; he would have called that man idiot . Yet it was what he had done. He had eaten his own water buffalo, he and his wife and his parents and his four children, they had all eaten the buffalo together. But what else could they do on that dark winter ’s day when the last of their store of grain was gone, when the trees were cut and sold, when he had sold everything, even the little they had saved from the flood, and there was nothing left except the shabby house they had and the worm clothes they wore? Was there sense in removing the coat from one's back to feed one's belly? On that day when he had seen the faces of his old parents set as though dead, on that day when he had heard the crying of his children and seen his little daughter dying. such a despair had seized him as made him like a man without his reason, so that he had gathered all his strength and he had done what he said he never would; he had taken the kitchen knife and gone out and killed his own beast. When he did it, even in his despair, he screamed, for it was as though he killed his own brother. To him it was the last sacrifice. _ __ (68) __ It would have taken them all except that in the great pools lying everywhere, which were left from the flood, there were shrimps ( 小虾 ), and these they had eaten raw and were still eating, although they were all sick and would not get well. In the last day or so his wife had crawled out and dug a few weeds. But there was no fuel and so they also were eaten raw. But the bitterness was good after the tasteless flesh of the raw shrimps. Yes, spring was coming . He sat on heavily, looking out over his land. If he had his buffalo back, if he had his plow that they had burned for fuel. But now he was comforted by nothing. And he looked, hopeless, into the barren ( 贫瘠的 ) spring.