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These plains are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage, scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer's sun, and in winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains.
Blocks of ice are cut from the river for that purpose; and on a hot summer's day a Peking coolie can obtain an iced drink at an almost infinitesimal cost. Grapes are preserved from autumn until the following May and June by the simple process of sticking the stalk of the bunch into a large hard pear, and putting it away carefully in the ice-house.
The voice was like the faint murmur of crickets on a hot summer's day. "The Duke has gone." "Gone? What! The devil he has!" "Sh-h! not five minutes ago! A message came from the Tsar himself. He has just slipped away." The officer gazed straight ahead of him smiling, and bowed to a couple ascending the stair-case. His lips parted as if in greeting. "Did he send you to tell me?" "No, the Duchess.
I maintain that things are as I have stated, and that at heart you are absolutely of my opinion. Yes, your poor heart has suffered very often; there are nights during which you have wept, poor angel, vainly awaiting the dream of the evening before. "Alas!" you say, "is it then all over? One summer's day, then thirty years of autumn, to me, who am so fond of sunshine."
Instead of the successive lines and reserves of the Grecian tactics, Romulus led his army in a single and solid phalanx, and pressed with vigor and impatience the artful and yielding resistance of the Barbarians. In this desultory and fruitless combat he spent the greater part of a summer's day, till prudence and fatigue compelled him to return to his camp.
They robbed their gardens, too, of the summer's last flowers, arum-lilies and brilliant geraniums, to decorate the Archdeacon's church for the festival; and many ladies spent the whole day beforehand making wreaths and crosses, and festoons to encircle the lamps. No one was busier than Polly. She wanted to give Purdy, who had been on short commons for so long, a special Christmas treat.
A fitful breeze blew through the chapel at the top of the building; we, the graduates, sat in two rows next to the platform, and behind us the wooden benches nicked by many knives were filled with sisters and mothers and fathers, some anxious, some proud and some sad. So brief a span, like that summer's day, and youth was gone!
His wicked black eyes were twinkling, which, with the scars distorting his features, gave him a look of curiously malevolent triumph. "Guess they're kind of rough figgers," he apologized. "But they're near enough to make good readin'." "What's the total?" The demand was sharp and masterful. "Just under ten thousand ounces since last reckoning. That's the last half of last summer's wash-up.
Seated in a splendid chair of state, borne aloft on the shoulders of his veterans, with a golden canopy above his head to protect him from the summer's sun, attended by the officers of his staff, who were decked by his special command in, their gayest trappings, escorted by his body-guard, followed by his "plumed troops," to the number of twenty thousand, surrounded by all the vanities of war, the hero made his stately entrance into the town.
The sun now set: a freezing cold, though of short duration pervaded the whole creation; it was like a horrid gust coming from a burial-vault on a warm summer's day but all around the mountains retained that wonderful green tone which we see in some old pictures, and which, should we not have seen a similar play of color in the South, we declare at once to be unnatural.
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