climate, though, speaking generally, the summer is everywhere very
warm, while the winter, from being almost of arctic severity in the
northern provinces, where the sea is frozen and all navigation stopped
for six weeks or two months, gradually becomes milder in lower
latitudes, until snow and frost are seldom experienced, and finally
never seen in the sub-tropical region of the extreme south. Many years
ago snow fell at Canton and the astonished natives are said to have
collected it in bottles to keep, believing that it was a kind of
cotton.

In the Yangtse valley during July, August and September, the heat at
times is well-nigh intolerable both by day and night. You arise in the
morning played out after a comfortless night under a punkah, which,
hung over your bed in the limited space of a mosquito house, is
pulled with a rope passing through the wall by a coolie stationed on
the verandah outside. With the thermometer standing at ninety degrees
in your bedroom you frame the mental query "Can I last through the
day?" as you crawl on to the verandah in pyjamas wet through with
perspiration, to watch the sun rise, hoping, but in vain, for a breath
of air. The insects buzz, a scorched smell pervades everywhere, the
birds hop listlessly about, gasping with wide-open bills, the fans of
coolies who have been sleeping on the grass, beat with hollow flap,
the sun rises like a furnace, and you must retreat again to the shadow
of your room to avoid sunstroke.

As the day advances the temperature creeps up until it is over a
hundred and you feel your eyes dry and heavy in their sockets, with a
throbbing in your ears, when for full-blooded people of any age it
becomes highly dangerous, death by heat apoplexy being painfully
common.

In the evening, after dinner, long chairs are taken out on the bund
and many assemble there in silence, betrayed only in the darkness by a
continual popping of corks and glowing cigar-tips, to catch what
little air there may chance to be, and to watch the lightning in hopes
that the oft-threatened storm will burst and break the heat.

I remember at Kiukiang the daily temperature rising to over a hundred
degrees in the shade for nearly three weeks at a stretch, culminating
in one hundred and seven, when a break came which, at any rate, saved
_my_ life and practically ended the summer.

Many a time, when too hot for sleep, have I played whist till three
o'clock in the morning. Selecting the corner