possesses a very capricious and disagreeable climate: disagreeable
from its constant high winds: but it is perhaps the most singularly
and remarkably healthy place in the world. This must surely arise
from the very gales which I found so trying to my temper, for damp
is a word without meaning; as for mildew or miasma, the generation
who are growing up there will not know the meaning of the words; and
in spite of a warm, bright day often turning at five minutes warning
into a snowy or wet afternoon, colds and coughs are almost unknown.
People who go out there with delicate lungs recover in the most
surprising manner; surprising, because one expects the sudden
changes of temperature, the unavoidable exposure to rain and even
snow, to kill instead of curing invalids. But the practice is very
unlike the theory in this case, and people thrive where they ought
to die.

During my first winter in Canterbury we had only one week of
_really_ bad weather, but I felt at that time as if I had never
realized before what bad weather meant. A true "sou'-wester" was
blowing from the first to the second Monday in that July, without
one moment's lull. The bitter, furious blast swept down the
mountain gorges, driving sheets of blinding rain in a dense wall
before it. Now and then the rain turned into large snow-flakes, or
the wind rose into such a hurricane that the falling water appeared
to be flashing over the drenched earth without actually touching it.
Indoors we could hardly hear ourselves speak for the noise of the
wind and rain against the shingle roof. It became a service of
danger, almost resembling a forlorn hope, to go out and drag in logs
of wet wood, or draw water from the well,--for, alas, there were no
convenient taps or snug coal-holes in our newly-erected little
wooden house. We husbanded every scrap of mutton, in very different