Weihaiwei July. 5—I often think that if I were stranded on a desert isle, after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, or the even more ingenious family of Swiss Robinsons, I could tell the date (as near as maybe) without any reference to notches cut in a stick: the seasons come and go with such regularity that every little token will tell you the time of year. Now the early summer flowers are fading and the increased power of the sun is dragging up, even from a dry soil, all the flowers of High Summer. "Lesser Heat" has given way to "Great Heat" and this, turned into terms of natural growth, means the appearance of all those herbs which bloom and fade so rapidly in brilliant sunshine: already I find the deep blue "Day-flower" otherwise known as Spiderwort (or even Mickey Mouse) and the great yellow Day Lily on its slender stalk: then there is the Snapdragon-like Toadüax with white and yellow flowers generally known as "Butter and Eggs" and the sóméwhat similar creamy-white blooms which we- call "White Slippers"; yellow Chinese Cinquefoil drooping heads of White Loosestrife, and pure white "Virgins Bower" (a sort of wild clematis) all announce that July heat is here: and that greatest of all beauty specialists, Madame Sol, shows how rapidly she can convert blondes into brunettes by dying the yellow Evening Primrose into a deep flame colour on her early morning rounds. The Cuckoo, too, true to his European reputation, "changes tune at end of June" and stammers out his familiar call, with sometimes six or eight "cucks" before he can pronounce
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.