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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 Excerpt:...an actual eclipse. She went down at 1.40 p.m. on this, our shortest day, but at 3 p.m. we could still read off the thermometers without using a lantern. It would be difficult to imagine a greater difference in the weather than that presented by these two years. It is true that the second winter was considerably colder at the beginning, but it was incomparably less stormy, although a climate in which the wind has a mean velocity per month of 6 metres (19J feet) per second must, of course, be always considered very windy. But, as it was, it made a considerable difference to us as wc were nearly always able to be out of doors, this latter fact being the only reason that the time did not seem to pass more slowly than it did. Some of us even thought that the time went rapidly; one said that the weeks went quickly and the months slowly; as for myself I had no clear idea whether the time passed quickly or not. I only know that when I looked back, everything appeared to me equally remote, whether it had happened one month or six previously. Of course we had some storms, but these merely reminded us how thankful we should be for the weather we usually enjoyed. But we had continually before our imaginations the picture of the storm which we felt certain must come after such a long succession of calm days; we painted in lively colours the terrors of the cold which might be expected when the early part of the winter had already been so severe in spite of the absence of south-west winds. And we called to mind that it was about the middle of July that we had experienced the greatest cold of the preceding year. It was, therefore, to say the least, very surprising when, on the 17th July, after a morning which showed about-300 C. (-220 F.), the wind suddenly changed into a...