The club is always a popular institution, where the male element of the community, frequently representing many nationalities, gathers for a game of billiards and a chat, and where the home and local papers, together with a fair number of books and magazines, are to be found. One evening during the tea season, just before dinner, I counted at one time fourteen nationalities in the bar of the Hankow Club. I like those friendly gatherings at the round table, when sport and other topics of our limited world are discussed, and when one generally manages to give or to receive an invitation to pot-luck, with a rubber or a gentle poker flutter to follow. There, too, is sometimes an American bowling alley, where on cold nights, or hot, for the matter of that, we roll huge wooden balls down a raised track for twenty yards, to scatter nine pins at the bottom. There are two parallel tracks and we make up two bowling parties of three or four aside, the losers to pay for the game and provide refreshments all round. China is so enormous in extent that it embraces almost every variety of climate, though, speaking generally, the summer is everywhere very warm, while the winter, from being almost of arctic severity in the northern provinces, where the sea is frozen and all navigation stopped for six weeks or two months, gradually becomes milder in lower latitudes, until snow and frost are seldom experienced, and finally never seen in the sub-tropical region of the extreme south. Many years ago snow fell at Canton and the astonished natives are said to have collected it in bottles to keep, believing that it was a kind of cotton. In the Yangtse valley during July, August and September, the heat at times is well-nigh intolerable both by day and night. You arise in the morning played out after a comfortless night under a punkah, which, hung over your bed in the limited space of a mosquito house, is pulled with a rope passing through the wall by a coolie stationed on the verandah outside. With the thermometer standing at ninety degrees in your bedroom you frame the mental query "Can I last through the day?" as you crawl on to the verandah in pyjamas wet through with perspiration, to watch the sun rise, hoping, but in vain, for a breath of air. The insects buzz, a scorched smell pervades everywhere, the birds hop listlessly about, gasping with wide-open bills, the fans of coolies who have been sleeping on the grass, beat with hollow flap, the sun rises like a furnace, and you must retreat again to the shadow of your room to avoid sunstroke. As the day advances the temperature creeps up until it is over a hundred and you feel your eyes dry and heavy in their sockets, with a throbbing in your ears, when for full-blooded people of any age it becomes highly dangerous, death by heat apoplexy being painfully common.