I have the honour, on this subject, to hand to Your Excellency a copy of an extract from a despatch recently received from the Commissioner of Customs at Mengizi, reporting the prevalence of the epidemic in his province.
Sir Robert Hart,
2nd October, 18??
Copy of Extract.
$25 I. C.
Inspector General
Sub. Enclosure.
368
The Mengizi Commissioner to the Inspector General.
Custom House,
Mengtze, 2nd October, 1890.
Influenza. This epidemic, which came, as far as I can learn, by the Yangtze route, has been in the province for some weeks, causing considerable loss of life in the Capital and in the neighbouring city of Lin-an-fu.
It has appeared in a mild form at Mengtze, but, if the number sick among the employees of large firms is a fair criterion whereby to estimate the prevalence of the epidemic in the town, one might almost...
Corrected and formatted version in HTML as requested. Note that I corrected "despatch" to a more standard spelling "despatch" is acceptable, but "dispatch" is more common; however, I kept "despatch" as it is in the original text), "corviderable" to "considerable", "fu" to "Lin-an-fu" (assuming it refers to the city mentioned), "nild" to "mild", "employes" to "employees", "estrinate" to "estimate", and "might" is kept as is, assuming "..." represents missing text. I also removed "двуії ні врешал," as it appears to be unrelated to the rest of the text and is likely an OCR error or text from a different document. The original text's formatting and structure were preserved as closely as possible while applying Markdown formatting rules for structure and correcting errors. However, the output is in HTML as per the final instruction.