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In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came to our help, almost everything connected with wheat-raising abounded in trying work, cradling in the long, sweaty dog-days, raking and binding, stacking, thrashing, and it often seemed to me that our fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was too closely connected with grave-digging.
Most of the buffets had been cleaned out by the army passing to the front. Thirst, intolerable and choking, was a greater pain in those hot dog-days and in those tedious interminable journeys. Yet it is only fair to say that on the whole those tourists chased across the Continent by the advancing spectre of war, behaved with pluck and patience. Some of them had suffered grievous loss.
Three large bavins set up his trade, with a bench, which, in the vacation of the afternoon, he used for his day-bed. When he comes on the stage at his prize he makes a leg seven several ways, and scrambles for money, as if he had been born at the Bath in Somersetshire. At his challenge he shows his metal, for, contrary to all rules of physic, he dares bleed, though it be in the dog-days.
I only hope that brute of a Cringer won't put her out of countenance." He need not have feared, though in truth Erica was tried to the utmost. To begin with, it was one of the very hottest of the dog-days, and the court was crowded to suffocation.
But this was not the worst; for when the dog-days came I found that the sun, at a certain hour, cast on the ceiling of my cell the reflection of the ripples on the garden-tank; and to say how I suffered from this sight is not within the power of speech.
Under the lime-trees there are a few green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither, during the dog-days, such of the lodgers as are rich enough to indulge in a cup of coffee come to take their pleasure, though it is hot enough to roast eggs even in the shade. The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics under the roof.
Then Dame Nature, who is sometimes called the All-mother, or Mother Carey, said: "Dear me, this will never do! No songbirds, woods silent all through the dog-days. Now who will be strike-breakers and volunteer to supply the music till the birds get once more in a good humour?"
The fields around the city were trampled down, the villages lay in ashes, the plundered peasantry lay faint and dying on the highways; foul odours infected the air, and bad food, the exhalations from so dense a population, and so many putrifying carcasses, together with the heat of the dog-days, produced a desolating pestilence which raged among men and beasts, and long after the retreat of both armies, continued to load the country with misery and distress.
The dog-days being at hand, and the young people frightened, they might as well be allowed to walk about, to calm their thoughts, until it was seen what would happen. He noticed, however, that some had 'caught ulcers in their pockets, others colic in their books, and others gout in their papers; some, too, had no doubt eaten their mother's letters, and hence got heart-ache and homesickness.
I couldn't see my way clear to house-cleanin' this whole great ark in dog-days for nobody, an' Edith an' Peter's got to leave the very day after Sylvia 'n Austin get married. Peter was hangin' round outside Edith's door the whole blessed time, after her fall " "Strange she should be so sick, just from a fall, ain't it?"
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