A LITTLE TOO WARM.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 3398, 1 March 1879, Page 3

A LITTLE TOO WARM.

-+ (jSeic York Weekly.) " lulls, about heat," said J^bncr Byng, a. we »-at upon the porch of Jones' conntrj store, trying to keep cool, " tliis 1 is nothing al all to what. I've seen ; it's coolness, absolute frigidity. Why, back here in IS-18, if the people would when I lived out in frfce Cannibal Islands, see the thermometer fa! to IOC degrees in the shade, they'd get out then skates and begin to consider the probabilities of an ice crop." " How high did it used to get ? : " asked Major Potts. " Q-enerally up- to four or lire hundred in the shade. They never did their cooking with fires out there. Always baked their bread in the sun. Lay a steak on the window-sill, and it would be done on one side before yon could stick a fork into it to turn it over. The water was hot, too. People never thought of trying to get ccld water to drink. Put' a leg of mutton down a well and it'd come up boiled, and you could pump mutton soup out of the well for two or three days. The first time I went to swim in the ocean out there I didn't know about it, and I was nearly scalded to death." li In the ocean ?' 5> " Yes: sir, in the Pacific Ocean. Why a dog in that country couldn't put down four legs at a time. . Ho would go on three legs, so as to give the other one a chance to cool. It was a common thing for horses to get their shoes red hot, and one summer I remember the pavements got so warm that several horses had their legs burned off clean up to the knee." " Did they have no cool weather at all ?" " Oh> yes. of course, that was in the rainy season. Then- it would get! very cold, sometimes, and tins caused a curious phenomenon. .The island I lived on was about eight miles long m winter time, but the heat of eummer was so intense that it would expand the island to the extent of about four miles, so she'd go, expanding and contracting from year to year, in the most extraordinary manner. I know just after I went there I bought a place of 12 acres of a man. Tt was summer time, and I paid him so much an acre. When the cool weather came I found it wasn't more than half the size it ought to be, and the trees were crowded up together so close that you couldn't Walk through them. Took advantage of me the man did. I ought to have bought in the winter." " Was it a prolific soil?" "Well, yes, when the season was good. In real hot weather things were slow in growing. But ordinarily my corn would be between three and four hundred feet high, and the stalks from six to nine feet in diameter at the base. We cut it with axes. The ears are generally about the size of a large lobster. There was a man over on one of the islands named Smith, who used to raise one turnip a 3'eav, and that wa3 enough, because a single turnip would cover three-quarters of an acre. But one good growing season Smith's- turnip grew so fearfully that it' covered the entire island, and Smith hud to move off and go up the side of a volcano back of his place. Howover, the turnip would grow ; couldn't be stopped, you know; and it did grow until finally it got so h^ivv that it sunk the island." '•'Did whatr" "Sunk the entire island, and that, you know, let the ocean into the volcano. This generated steam so fast that the whole thing exploded, and Smith was blown sixty-threo miles out to seiiy and picked up, discouraged, by a San Francisco ship. He told a friend of mine that that was the last turnip he would ever raise. Yes, sir, it was hot in those regions. Let a man in good health step out of doors in the middle of the day, and he'd come back all black and wrinkly, exactly like dried beef. I've known men who cured' themselves in that way so that with a couple of days in a smoke-house they'd keep for two hundred years, alive and as good as ever. And evaporation was so great that I've seen the ocean fall one hundred and fifty feet under a hot sun until you could Avade twenty miles from land." '• Did you ever do it ?" asked the major. "Often. I've waded forty miles out." " I thought you said the water was boiling hot •"' "Boiling hot? Well, I believe I— oh yes, of course, boiling hot sometimes, but— but of course, I wore my boots. No, sir — if any man catches me telling a lie, I give him leave to kick me on the spot." Then up rose the major, and elevating the toe of his boot, he applied it to the rear elevation of Abner, and sent him whizzing- out into the street. Abner picked himself up, brushed the dust off his trousers, and coming back to the porch smiling, he winked at the major and said — " Major, you're the quickest man to take a hint that I ever met." Then Abner borrowed a dime from Jones, and went away in search of a cooling beverage.