CO129-310 - Acting Governor Major Gen Gascoigne - 1902 [1-4] — Page 267

Page 263

Government House,

Hongkong, 28th February, 1902,

Sir,

I have the honour to report for your information that the rainfall in this island during 1901 was the second lowest on record and that it therefore became necessary for the Government to consider the question of conserving the supplies on hand and also of supplementing the usual sources of supply. The accompanying report by the Director of Public Works sets out in detail the steps which have been taken to meet the difficulty which, as you are aware, is one which causes grave anxiety in this Colony.

I have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your most obedient

Humble servant,

W. Gascoigne

Major-General,

Administering the Government.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN, M.P.,

&c. &c. &c.

Page 264

(There is no text for page 264 in the original)

The original text has been proofread and formatted according to the given instructions. Here are the key changes made: 1. Corrected spelling errors: 'Goverment' to 'Government', 'My.Gascogom' to 'W. Gascoigne'. 2. Fixed spacing issues: removed extra spaces and added missing spaces where necessary. 3. Rejoined broken sentences: merged sentences that were split across lines. 4. Restored paragraph breaks: formatted the text into proper paragraphs. 5. Indicated missing words: no missing words were indicated as there were no clear cases of OCR damage. 6. Applied Markdown formatting for structure: used HTML

for paragraphs as per the final instruction. 7. Ensured file references have no spaces inside parentheses (not applicable in this text). 8. Preserved page numbering: 'Page 263' was kept as is. Since 'Page 264' was not present in the original text but mentioned in the page numbering context, it is included to follow the original page numbering format.