Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Letter n. A DELIGHTFUL CLIMATE. 35 LETTER II. The Palace, Victoria, December 29. I Like and admire Victoria. It is so pleasant to come in from the dark, misty, coarse, loud-tongued Pacific, and the December colourlessness of Japan to bright blue waters crisped by a perpetual north wind—to the flaming hills of the Asian mainland, which are red in the early morning, redder in the glow of noon, and pass away in the glorious sunsets through ruby and vermilion into an amethyst haze, deepening into the purple of a tropic night, when the vast expanse of sky which is seen from this high elevation is literally one blaze of stars. Though they are by no means to be seen in perfection, there are here many things that I love,—rbananas, poinsettias, papayas, tree-ferns, dendrobiums, dracenas, the scarlet passionflower, the spurious banyan, date, sago, and traveller's palms, and numberless other trees and shrubs, children of the burning sun of the tropics, carefully watered and tended, but exotics after all. It is a most delightful winter climate. There has not been any rain for three months, nor will there be any for two more; the sky is cloudless, the air dry and very bracing. It is cold enough at night for fires, and autumn, clothing can be worn all the day long, for though the sun is bright and warm, the shade temperature does not rise above 65, and exercise is easy and pleasant. At nighteven at a considerable height, the lowest temperature is 40. It is impossible to praise the climate too highly, with its bright sky, cool dry air, and five months of rainless- ness, but I should write very differently if I came here four months later, when the mercury ranges from 80 to 90 both by day and night, and the cloudy sky rests ever on the summits of the island peaks, and everything is m... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.