The Star. MONDAY, MARCH 20, 1911. THESE HOT DAYS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10107, 20 March 1911, Page 2

The Star. MONDAY, MARCH 20, 1911. THESE HOT DAYS.

It v/as Mary Clemmer -who applied the immortal description of "dead Summer's soul" to the Indian summer, and it anust have been in just such breather as we are now experiencing that a flippant and famous contemporary added the comment, " sheltering in Hades." These hot days are the weather for the outdoor life, for " singing beside the shimmering sea," but they are disastrous to the country. We must all of us be repeating with Rossiter Johnson: O for a lodge in a garden of cucumbers! 0 for an iceberg or two at control 1 '' 0 for a vale that at midday the dew cumbers! O for a pleasure trip ur> to the Pole!

Captain Scott is having all the luck, for he and his morry men can be taking their drinks straight off the ice. Here we are feeling with Sydney Smith when he declared that there was nothing left for it hut to take off his flesh and sit in his bones; or with Keats when, he sang: 0 for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long ag-e in tho doep-delved earth! Man may not be able to quench a fire in his bones by thinking on tho frosty Caucasus, but in the hot weather he never gives up trying. There is probably not a soul in the city who is not to-day thinking of the shade of thick trees, the murmur of mountain creeks, cool spring water bubbling up out of Mother Earth; or perhaps of the clean not sands of. a long yellow sea-beach, with breakers curling in, and the tide rising to make bathing the safer. The holiday system of this country is •as conservative and antiquated as it can ivell be. "We are always having holiday, and yet never when wo want it. Holidays ought never to be fixed feasts. It ought to be the rule that when the sun is blazing overhead and the air Is palpitating, and tho mirage is dancing over the tussocks, all work should cease, and it should rest with each man whether ho lay down and dozed or whether he sought a bosky dell or the seashore. And yet, we suppose, when tho tired and happy citizen who has enjoyed the unbounded boon of having nothing to do all day long returned to the city in the cool of the evening he would still want his evening newspaper with the world's news in it, so that from the purely selfish point of view a holiday reform, movement would be of small benefit. Occasionally a visitor compares our country to Italy, and we dare say the comparison is a fair one, but, alas! we lack tho one institution that makes life bearable in Italy, and that is the siesta. Some genius will suggest the municipal bath as a relief, but even that is tepid! Tho weather expert promises strong northwest to north-east wind and electrical rain storms, and here wo are sweltering at noon with scarcely a breath of wind to temper the old sun's rays. If u Cook's tour to the Antarctic were being organised to-day even the Mauritania would ho a full ship.