We have all of us, at some time or another, said, “I never felt so hot in my life!” This has been less with relation to actual caloric than to a sudden flush of awkwardness attendant upon having asked people after their dead relations, or uncomfortable family affairs; or in expectation of some accidental and unintentional revelation of a circumstance in our own lives, of which we were not remarkably proud. Or, more especially, on being introduced by a gushing man to an enemy you had long since cut, with the assurance that you ought both to know each other. But I find this morning that I feel hotter still. The wind blows against me as from the door of a glasshouse; and the sun comes straight down like a red-hot nail, even through my double umbrella (which I am careful to put up before I venture out on the terrace), and my light but thick pith hat. At such times your claret is self-mulled, and butter becomes thick oil. You cannot find a cool place on your hard-stuffed pillow. The sun apparently _twists_ its rays—sends them round corners, and through venetians, and under porticos; the light being so vivid that its mere reflection banishes shade. The swinging punkah—which A-wa, whose picture you have seen on cheap grocers’ tea-papers, pulls night and day, awake and asleep, as though he were a slightly vitalized lever-escapement—this flounced and flirting terror of all bilious people gets up a delusive breeze, and when it stops the heat comes rushing back with double force. Everything you wear clings to you; or, if flannel, fetches out the “prickly heat” until you are beside yourself. In every draught, one side is chilled whilst the other is burned, as happens at the fireplace of an old country house, where one side is roasted, whilst on the other you are nearly blown up the chimney. And when you are actually out and about, you appear to live and move in the focus of one large burning-glass. It is a dead thick heat, that you fancy might be cut into blocks, and stored in Arctic ships for gradual distribution.