Excerpt from To Call Her Mine Etc

AS one saw the place this evening, one might see it every evening, for in New Ireland there is neither summer nor winter, but always, all the year round, the promise of spring, the heat of summer, and the fruition of autumn with no winter at all, except the winter Of death, when the branches cease to put forth leaves and stretch out white arms, Spectral and threatening, among their living com panions in the forest. Sometimes one may see whole acres Of dead forest standing like Skeletons by day and like ghosts by night, till the white ants shall have gnawed their way through the trunks to prepare their fall, and till the young shoots at their feet shall have Sprung up round them to hide the ghastly whiteness of death. The reason Of this commingling of Spring and summer, autumn and winter, is that the latitude of New Ireland, as everybody knows, is about 4 degrees south, which is very near the isothermal line. People who desire to feel the warmth of this latitude a Warmth which goes right through and through a man, like light through a pane of glass - need not go so far as New Ireland, but may stop on their way at Singapore, where there are not only no cannibals, but the hotels - there are no hotels in New Ireland - are 'replete, ' as the advertisements say, 'with every comfort.' Considering that New Ireland has been Visited by so very few, and that the place is as yet entirely unexplored, the fact that here were two Europeans upon it at the same time, and yet not arrived there with the same Objects, was in itself remarkable; the more so because its people have a curious and cultivated taste in cookery, and prefer roasted Brother Man to the roast Of any other animal.

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