"Ninety-four years prior to the summer that now concerns us, a cold spell had occurred after an interval of eighty-one years, which lasted a hundred and ten hours, and during which one-third of the inhabitants of Hili-li, between hunger and cold, lost their lives. Not more than one hundred persons remembered the last preceding storm, and they must have been very young children when it occurred; and even they felt no alarm on the subject, as the storm preceding it had happened about sixteen years earlier, and, though a light one, was sufficient to alarm both the rulers and the masses, and resulted in a state of preparedness for the next storm. But now, the middle-aged men knew of these cold spells only as matters of history, to which they gave little practical attention; and from the lips of their grandparents, who, as I have said, had never personally known one of them to cause serious distress or loss of life. "On the morning of February 17, 1829, there was not on the Island of Hili-li a single residence which had the wood-supply contemplated by the forgotten statute relating to that subject; there were few homes that had in store food sufficient for more than forty-eight hours use; and, though most families were in possession of some oil, their cook-stoves were not constructed for heating, and were connected with flues in outbuildings; and, further, there was not enough oil on the island to have warmed the city at such a time for twenty-four hours. "It must also be remembered that the Hili-lites were accustomed to a temperature, all the year through, year in and year out, of 90° to 108° Fahrenheit scale; and that for a resident of England, or of the United States above the latitude of Washington City, a temperature of ten degrees below zero would be quite as well borne as would a temperature of thirty degrees above zero by these islanders. There was little physical and mental inurement to cold, and the lightest of clothing was worn. A resident of Hili-li, when business compelled him to visit an island on which the temperature was cold enough to freeze water, prepared himself personally for the journey as would a Swede or Norwegian for a journey of exploration to the North Pole.