which experts
who had passed the whole of their summers in the furnace of the Diamond
City inveighed against the slowness of the instrument and its lapse from
the path of rectitude. The cant of the day ordained the twenty-fifth of
December the "hottest day of the year." Well, the newcomers felt that
if it were to be redder than the twenty-fourth they might jump into the
Kimberley mine, without danger of landing on their feet, and enjoy a
better pudding in a better and (perhaps) cooler world. It was a day to
make one fed in all seriousness that life is not worth living; and to a
man fresh from over-sea the association of Christmas with such
weather--to say nothing of the victuals!--was the acme of satire. There
is no whiteness in the African Christmas, and for the first time in
their lives the newcomers sighed for a "green" one! A "green" one would
cool the atmosphere, and a cooler atmosphere would content us. We would
gladly let the turkey and the pudding pass if the Turkish Bath would go
too. Had the shade of _Santa Claus_, or the flesh and blood of anybody,
come loaded with poultry for our "stockings," we should not have said,
thank you. Our appetites were gone. They were gone, and all we asked was
that they should be restored for Christmas Day--just as if _Claus_ had
indeed made amends for the cruel kindness of the "Clerk!" It was kind of
Sir Alfred Milner to arrange a congratulatory flash of compliments (by
signal from Modder River) and to wish us all sorts of luck. One sort
would have sufficed: the kind contained in a record output of rain.
Would it come? First it would--and then it would not. A duststorm
intervened by way of compromise; it was a breeze--hot, choking,
blinding, but still a breeze. We got thunder and lightning, too; but the
rain hesitated--as if it knew there was little left to soak in
Kimberley. It ultimately relented, however, and came down in torrents
through the night.

Christmas Day itself! It had come, cool, delicious; the change, the
metamorphosis in the weather, the disappearance of the azure sky was
strange and lovely. Those shifting, hustling clouds, how pleasant they
were to look at. The day was the antithesis of its predecessor--the
mildest we had had for a long, long time. It was a relief to find that
the "hottest day of the year" was a figurative expression used to denote
the middle of summer. Our fears of cremation were entirely
dissipated--as sometimes happens in the case of passenge