20th January.
AxrHoucH we grumble at times a5 the fact that the last employment of P. and O. steamers before they are sent to the knacker's yard, or sold to an Indian native to run on the coast of the Peninsula, which is much the same thing, is to carry the mails between Colombo and Shanghai, we still follow with interest and good will the fortunes the great steamship company which has been managed so ably for so many years by Sir Thomas Sutherland. It is impossible not to recognise, too, the perfect regularity with which the P. and O. Ca. delivers its mails here. Whatever the weather in the China Sea, N.E. monsoon or S.W. monsoon, gale or fog or calm, the P. and O. mail is nearly always before and never behind its schedule time; and it is difficult to recall a case within the last quarter of a century, say, of an outward-bound P. and O. mail steamer breaking down. We are naturally, therefore, interested in the sixty-third annual report of the company, which bears date the 2nd
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.