London, Aug. 30.
While we Englishmen claim " netional privilege to grumble at the weather with which nature has endowed us, we usually temper our complaints with an element of com placent satisfaction. We congratulate} ourselves that our climate is "'temperate", not exposed—for mors than a rare few days—to torrid heat or excessive cold, not subject to the violent storms and devastating deluges of some tropical regions.
But this summer we cannot even choer ourselves with thave consoling reflexions. For weeks we have telling ourselves that the spell of cold, cheerless damp weather, with never a whole dry day, must, according to all the laws of averages, soon come to an end; but when two or three hours of sunshine have raised our hopes, back come the dark clouds, the cold winds and the rain.
Usually when people declare that never in their lives have they experienced such weather in England before, a reference to the meteorological office reveals the fact that just such weather, or even worse weather, has bean experienced on several occasions within the past few years; but this time even the official experts have to acknowledge that a "record" has been established.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.