Easter Island lies in the sub-tropics, and, if the question of wind be eliminated, the climate is as near perfection as possible in this world. There may be, especially in the winter months, a spell of three or four days of rain, or a wind from the Antarctic, when woollen clothes are welcome; and occasionally, in the summer, it is preferable to be indoors during the noontide hours; but with these exceptions, it is one of those rare localities where it is possible to be warm the whole year round, and yet to utilise to the full the hours of daylight. There are, as might be expected, too many insects; cockroaches abound, out of doors and under statues as well as in houses and tents; when things were very bad they might even be seen on the dinner-table. I was calmly told, with masculine insensibility, that “if I had not naturally a taste for such things, the sooner that I acquired it the better”; the only consolation was that they were of a handsome red variety and not shiny black. Flies also are numerous; I have counted two hundred in a bowl of soapy water, and six or eight at once on my hand while busy writing; “their tameness was shocking to me.” Mosquitoes, which have been imported, varied in their attentions; when they were at their worst it was necessary to wear head-gear and dine in gloves. There is said to be no fever in the islands; we had two or three attacks, but it may have been “original sin.” Once we had a plague of little white moths, and occasionally, for a short while, visitations of a small flying beetle, whose instinct seemed to be to crawl into everything, making it safer to stuff one’s ears with cotton-wool. On these occasions dinner had to be put earlier, owing to Bailey’s pathetic complaint that, with a lamp burning in the kitchen, business was rendered impossible from the crowds which committed suicide in the soup.