Chapter 8

ON ONE SIDE ONLY

NEW OXFORD, U.S.A., _June-July_ 1892.

'The truth is,' said the man in the train, 'that we live in a tropical
country for three months of the year, only we won't recognise. Look at
this.' He handed over a long list of deaths from heat that enlivened the
newspapers. All the cities where men live at breaking-strain were
sending in their butcher-bills, and the papers of the cities, themselves
apostles of the Gospel of Rush, were beseeching their readers to keep
cool and not to overwork themselves while the hot wave was upon them.
The rivers were patched and barred with sun-dried pebbles; the logs and
loggers were drought-bound somewhere up the Connecticut; and the grass
at the side of the track was burned in a hundred places by the sparks
from locomotives. Men--hatless, coatless, and gasping--lay in the shade
of that station where only a few months ago the glass stood at 30 below
zero. Now the readings were 98 degrees in the shade. Main Street--do you
remember Main Street of a little village locked up in the snow this
spring?[2]--had given up the business of life, and an American flag
with some politician's name printed across the bottom hung down across
the street as stiff as a board. There were men with fans and alpaca
coats curled up in splint chairs in the verandah of the one hotel--among
them an ex-President of the United States. He completed the impression
that the furniture of the entire country had been turned out of doors
for summer cleaning in the absence of all the inhabitants. Nothing looks
so hopelessly 'ex' as a President 'returned to stores,' The stars and
stripes signified that the Presidential Campaign had opened in Main
Street--opened and shut up again. Politics evaporate at summer heat when
all hands are busy with the last of the hay, and, as the formers put it,
'Vermont's bound to go Republican.' The custom of the land is to drag
the scuffle and dust of an election over several months--to the
improvement of business and manners; but the noise of that war comes
faintly up the valley of the Connecticut and is lost among the fiddling
of the locusts. Their music puts, as it were, a knife edge upon the heat
of the day. In truth, it is a tropical country for the time being.
Thunder-storms prowl and growl round the belted hills, spit themselves
away in a few drops of rain, and leave the air more dead than before. In
the woods, where even the faithful springs are beginning to run low, the
pines and balsams have thrown out all their fragrance upon the heat and
wait for the wind to bring news of the rain. The clematis, wild carrot,
and all the gipsy-flowers camped by sufferance between fence line and
road net are masked in white dust, and the golden-rod of the pastures
that are