Winter, except when & mere note of time in the tropics, is not by any means a pleasant word to the majority of earth's populace. It may be very stern reality in those regions where the primitive evolution of architecture stopped short ages ago, without giving four solid walls to a dwelling-room.
We do not always realize that China's millions, for instance, live, winter as well as summer, in the open air all the time. For their living rooms, three walls are considered the correct quantum. Their living room is their ''guest-hall, with its wide front aperture (of door or doors) always kept politely pen by day. Where we speak of catching a cold," their phrase is "wounded by the wind;"" and one need not spend a long time, on any day that is both chilly and windy, in any of their "guest-halls," whether of the—lordlier Aungkuan or the humbler cottage, to discover what that phrase means. It was an Asiatic who wrote the venerable words: "a covert from the wind," and such a covert can hardly be said to be found in any but the comparatively few Westernized living-rooms in China.
What Western fashion has done for the Chinese has been to tighten the encasements of their four limbs, and thus afford them a portable covert, The old flowing drapery of the sleeve, so beloved of Chinese artists, only survives in the Taoist robes of state; and (alas, for aesthetic considerations) the graceful divided skirt of girlhood has mostly disappeared in favour of ultra-mannish tights. Yet in the sleeve, the length, at any rate, remains as of yore. "Thus every coolie in winter, as well as his wife and children, is practically provided with a wind-tight muff. And he and they need it full often!
These reflexions have been forced! upon the writer in a recent weekend up-country.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.