of one hundred and eleven degrees in the shade and one
hundred and seventy-nine degrees in the sun.

"So great is the heat of the sun at midday that travelers generally try
to avoid it if they can do so. It is the plan of most people who travel
on horseback, in wagons, or on foot, to start before daylight, and keep
going until nine or ten o'clock. Then they halt and rest until three or
four o'clock in the afternoon, when they move on and continue until late
in the evening. Of course, the railways are not run on that principle,
as the locomotive is not supposed to be affected by the outside
temperature.

"But I am getting away from the southerly burster. The wind blew like a
hurricane. It kept up this rate for about three hours, filling the air
with dust so that we could not see across the street. Though the doors
and windows were tightly closed, the dust found its way inside the house
and was present everywhere; every article of furniture was covered with
it.

"We found it in the food, we found it in our beds, and the next day when
I opened my trunk to take out some articles of clothing, I actually
found that the dust had worked its way inside in a perceptible quantity.
One of the waiters of the hotel said, that always after a burster they
found dust inside of bottles of mineral water which had been tightly
corked up to the time of opening. I am inclined to doubt the truth of
his assertion, particularly as he offered no documentary evidence to
confirm it.

"Along towards night it came on to rain, and, oh, how it did rain! It
poured as though the flood gates of the skies had all been opened at
once. It rained not only cats and dogs, as the old expression has it,
but lizards, scorpions, snakes, and I don't know what else, at least it
did figuratively. The gutters of the streets were filled, and then we
were able to see how easy it was for a man, and especially for a child,
to be drowned in them. I have seen it rain hard in a good many places,
but am sure I never saw it rain harder than it did at the end of that
southerly burster.

"I remarked as much to a gentleman whose acquaintance we had made in
the hotel, and he answered:--

"'Oh, nonsense. That is no rain at all.'

"'No rain at all,' I answered. 'Do you have worse rains than this in
Australia?'

"'Why, certainly we do,' he replied. 'I have known it to rain so hard
that this would be a sprinkle by comparison. I remember the 25th of
February, 1873, when nin