TROPICAL LONDON.

Evening Post, Volume XXII, Issue 73, 24 September 1881, Page 4

TROPICAL LONDON.

4. Residents in Australia (remarks the Home News), especially in the regions moat affected with prevailing high temperature, will perhaps smile when they hear what a coil wo have been raising in England about the recent great heats. But our good cousins are more accustomed to it than we are, and London is not at all a city of the sun. What people suffered during those tropical days might be . gathered from the desperate efforts they made to keep cool. There was a rage for big Japanese paper umbrellas, which were carried by all classes. Navvies and working men turned out in enormous straw hats ; the 'bus drivers and omnibuq cads, condemned to long hourß in the blazing sun, wore large white puggariea, to which many added al«o a cool summer cabbage-leaf under their hats. Members of Parli9 ment were to be seen going down to the House in a full suit of white drill ; the Prime Minister carried a white umbrella, and the great chambers in Parliament were artificially cooled by currents of iced air. Indoors, a few wise people tried to exclude the heat by closing all apertures and keeping rooms dark, but the largest number threw open every window to the torrid external atmosphere, and vainly pined for a cooling breeze. Ot conrse the demand for iced drinks was everywhere inappeasable ; cold meats, mayonnaises, chaudfroids, aspics of all sorts, appeared on every table ; if the heat had continued we shonld have had punk-ths, and and iced baths. But nothing lasts long in England, and within 24 hours of the greatest heat people were shivering in the cold blast and wishing for their great-coats.