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At one moment, in spite of the heat, he shivered, at another he felt that an apoplexy must strike him. For some half hour he walked to and fro along the sea-wall, between the blackness of the sky and the lead-coloured water, and then his thoughts turned to the downs above this stricken place, where, even in the sultriest days some breath of wind was always moving.
With care of the luggage, shawls, hackmen, and tickets, we all contrived to become separated, and I found myself crushed into one corner of a little Black Hole of Calcutta, with no chair to sit in, no space to stand in, and no air to breathe, on the sultriest day that Canada had known for years.
The rickety little office, built of red brick, was set flush with the street the main street of the town of Bethel. Bethel rested upon the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge. Above it the mountains were piled to the sky. Far below it the turbid Catawba gleamed yellow along its disconsolate valley. The June day was at its sultriest hour. Bethel dozed in the tepid shade. Trade was not.
This defiance of the seasons, forcing Nature to do her work of congelation in the face of her sultriest noon, might well inspire a timid mind with fear lest human art were revolting against the Higher Powers, and raise the same scruples which resisted the use of ether and chloroform in certain contingencies.
It was Saturday, the first of September, and the hot dry weather having continued with but trifling changes throughout the month, the atmosphere was at its sultriest, and the burnt grass in the parks looked as if even the dews of morning and evening had ceased to moisten it, while the arid and dusty foliage gave no feeling of coolness, and the very shadows cast upon that parched ground seemed hot.
I then dressed, disposed of these things neatly in my coat pockets, and went to the doctor's to dinner. In one respect, Fortune favored my audacity. It was the sultriest day of the whole season surely they could not think of shutting up the second-floor back windows to-night! Alicia was pale and silent.
On a garden chair in the little lawn in the middle of it sat the Princess Elizabeth hidden from him by the thick wall of a pear tree, and in a chair beside her, sat, or rather sprawled, her guardian, the Baroness Frederica Von Aschersleben, who was following faithfully the doctor's instructions that her little charge should spend her time in the open air, but was doing her best to bring it about that the practise should do her as little good as possible by choosing the sultriest and most airless spot on the estate because it was so admirably adapted to her own comfortable sleeping.
When he retired to the armchair, after dinner, and relapsed into a sulky silence, Susan remembered that the obligation to amuse him was also nominated in the bond. Luckily his tastes were literary, which rendered her task a simple one. Susan stepped into the tightly-closed, partially darkened parlor which never in the sultriest weather seemed wholly to lose the chill of its unwarmed winter days.
It was to be anything but a picnic, for here were nearly seven thousand Americans of all sorts, who were obtaining their first experiences of what war might really be, if made in any manner whatever in the sultriest kind of southern weather.
There are quaint terraces shadowed by clipped ilex-trees whose branches make twilight even in the sultriest noon; there are long-drawn paths, through wildernesses where cyclamens blossom in crimson clouds among crushed fragments of sculptured marble green with the moss of ages, and glossy-leaved myrtles put forth their pale blue stars in constellations under the leafy shadows.
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