Hongkong, Jan. 14.
Hongkong has certainly outgrown its present accommodation. There has been a shortage of houses for some time past and the hotels must by now have grown accustomed to turning away applicants for rooms. Every place has a waiting list and with the arrival of every big steamer there are always some people who get left in the cold. These have been the conditions prevailing for some months past, but during the Christmas and New Year holidays the congestion has seemed worse than ever.
We have not even a decent hall for giving a dance. The old City Hall, with the antiquated Theatre Royal, has to serve for want of anything better, but over a thousand guests attended the St. Andrew's Ball and St. George's Ball, and, as a result, there was scarcely room to turn round at either function. Dancing, in the circumstances, developed into something like a struggle for elbow space.
The great trouble is that everyone wishes to live on the island where there is little possibility for devel-lopments, The Peak Tramway, even which during the war used to run regularly with almost empty cars, is now hard put to it to cope with the traffic. During the tiffin hour it is a common occurrence for ten or a dozen people to be left at the station' platform when each tram leaves, and things have come to such a pass that the ladies have been exhorted not to do their shopping at midday in order to give the hard worked commercial man a chance to get home for his meal. And yet-more than the usual number of residents have gone on long leave. When one considers that the same cry of "house full" is going up from every larine centre of population in the world, one wonders where on earth all the people have come from.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.