Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/439

383

American in India dwells not only in a strange land, and among a people of a strange tongue, but he also breathes a foreign atmosphere, and endures a foreign climate. He is and must be an exotic transplanted from his native soil, and, as an exotic, lives an unnatural life.

The constant heat to which residents of Madras are subjected is, to those who come from a cold climate, exceedingly trying. The mean temperature for the whole year is 84° of Fahrenheit's thermometer. It is not so much the heat of any one day, though that is often great, as the want of cool nights and bracing winters, the unbroken continuousness of the heat, that enfeebles them. When it is kept in mind that January, the coldest winter month in Madras, is hotter on an average of the twenty-four hours than the average of July in New 383