"COben Minter Comes 37 



WHEN WINTER COMES 



What an arrant impostor Winter is ! Here for 

 weeks past have we been a-shivering with its varied 

 inclemencies, and now does it come forward and 

 coolly oh, how coolly ! declare that it was but 

 " making believe," and that the real season, the 

 Winter which is officially and astronomically Winter, 

 only began on the Wednesday before Christmas, at 

 eleven o'clock in the morning, if you please. Alas ! 

 the declaration is a true one ; on that day the sun 

 with us touched his lowest point ; it was the day of 

 the Winter Solstice. And being at his lowest point 

 with us, he was, of course, at his highest with our 

 South African kinsfolk. 



Favoured South Africans ! How you of Durban, of 

 Cape Town, of Pietermaritzburg, of Port Elizabeth, of 

 Pretoria must enjoy this Christmastide joke of us 

 snowbound and fogbound Britishers at home ! An 

 Arctic scene of snow and ice and gloom outside, and 

 the thermometer in my back garden registering eleven 

 degrees of frost as I write ! And the sun ? Why, 

 hours ago, his beamless coppery disk peeped over the 

 ridge of the houses opposite, dodged quickly behind a 

 chimney-stack, and disappeared for the rest of the 

 day. 



All this, too, through the wretched reversal of seasons 

 whereby our sun sneaks in a shamefaced way red 

 with shame, indeed, only some twelve to fourteen 

 degrees above the fog-girt horizon, and your sun, ye 

 Durbanites, rises to zenithal majesty a 'most. 



I cannot entertain a thought that the Durbanites 

 could dream of envying us our fogs and snow and frost. 



