hot. All summer has this great heat continued, and it makes
one nervous. Day after day it lasts, unbroken, always the same,
unavoidable. There is no escape from the stifling dampness of it--one
cannot breathe. Over all the land it is like this, this heavy, sultry
heat. It is no cooler when it rains, no dryer when the hot sun shines.
It is enveloping, engulfing. In the big hotel, the leather shoes of
the foreigners become mouldy overnight, and the sweat runs in streams
from the brown bodies of the rickshaw boys. The rickshaw boys of the
big hotel wear clothes, long legged, tight cotton trousers, and
flapping white coats. This is to save the feelings of the foreigners
and the missionaries, who believe that clothing should always be worn,
even in hot weather. So as the rickshaw boy runs along, one can see
his white coat grow damp between the shoulder blades, then wet all
across the back, till it is all wet and sticks to him tight. Yet it is
more modest to wear clothes, when doing the work of a horse. One does
not object to a man doing the work of a horse, provided he dress like
a man. But the coolies toiling at the log carts, and the little
tradesmen in their shops, wear few clothes, because they are
independent of the foreigners. Therefore they seem to suffer less with
the heat, or to suffer less obviously. Ah, but the heat is intense,
overwhelming! Day after day, one cannot breathe. And in it, cholera
goes on.

They say a typhoon is coming. Word has come from Formosa that a
typhoon is rushing up from the southern seas, from Hong Kong, the
Equator, wherever it is they come from. It will reach us to-night.
That will be better. The heat will go then, blown from the land by the
gigantic blast of the typhoon, zig-zagging up the coast from Formosa.
Well, it is late September--this unnatural heat,--why will it not
leave? Why must it linger till torn like a blanket from the sweating
earth, by this hurricane from the Southern seas?

Only it did not come--the typhoon. They said it would, but it failed.
Has it gone shooting off into the Pacific, futile? So the damp,
stifling heat lingers, and the toll of cholera rolls slowly upward day
by day.

It is a long way from Nikko to Tokyo by motor. A hundred miles, when
one can cross the bridge, but the bridge is washed away now, so a
detour of many more miles is necessary, to ferry the motor across the
Tonegawa on a flat bottomed, frail boat. The motor sinks nearly to the
hubs in the