Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/17

 I replied that I thought it was somewhere about the middle. He said:

"Well, now, you take my advice, and get a calico suit and a sunshade. Never mind the look of the thing. You be comfortable. You've no idea of the heat on the Continent at this time of the year. English people will persist in travelling about the Continent in the same stuffy clothes that they wear at home. That's how so many of them get sunstrokes, and are ruined for life."

I went into the club, and there I met a friend of mine—a newspaper correspondent—who has travelled a good deal, and knows Europe pretty well. I told him what my two other friends had said, and asked him which I was to believe. He said:

"Well, as a matter of fact, they are both right. You see, up in those hilly districts, the weather changes very quickly. In the morning it may be blazing hot, and you will be melting, and in the evening you may be very glad of a flannel shirt and a fur coat."

"Why, that is exactly the sort of weather we have in England!" I exclaimed. "If that's all these foreigners. can manage in their own country, what right have they to come over here, as they do, and grumble about our weather?"

"Well, as a matter of fact," he replied, "they haven't any right; but you can't stop them-they will do it. No, you take my advice, and be prepared for everything. Take a cool suit and some thin things, for if it's hot, and plenty of warm things in case it is cold."

When I got home I found Mrs. Briggs there, she having looked in to see how the baby was. She said:

"Oh! if you're going anywhere near Germany, you take a bit of soap with you."