AS the spring days lengthened there was forced upon Grace a suspicion, which soon ripened into a conviction, that the West was very hot. She had known hot days in the East; for is there in the desert of Sahara any air hotter than that which overlies the treeless, paved streets, walled in by high structures of brick, stone, and iron, of the city of New York? But in New York the wind, on no matter how hot a day, is cool and refreshing; at Claybanks and vicinity the wind was sometimes like the back-draught of a furnace, and almost as wilting. To keep the wind out of the house--not to give it every opportunity to enter, as had been the summer custom in the East--became Grace's earnest endeavor, but with little success. At times it seemed to her that the heat was destroying her vitality; her husband, too, feared for her health and insisted that she should go East to spend the summer; but Grace insisted that she would rather shrivel and melt than go away from her husband, so Philip appealed to Doctor Taggess, who said:-- "Quite womanly, and wifely, and also sensible, physiologically, for no one can become climate-proof out here if he dodges any single season. If your wife will follow my directions for a few months, she will be able to endure next season's heat well enough to laugh at it. Indeed, it might help her through the coming summer to make excuses to laugh at it: she's lucky enough to know how to laugh at slight provocation." But the dust! Grace could remember days when New York was dusty, and any one who has encountered a cloud of city dust knows that it is of a quality compared with which the dust of country roads is the sublimation of purity. Nevertheless, the dust at Claybanks had some eccentric methods of motion. For it to rise in a heavy, sullen cloud whenever a wagon passed through a street was bad enough, especially if the wind were in the direction of the house. Almost daily, however, and many times a day, it was picked up by little whirlwinds that came from no one knew where, and an inverted cone of dust, less than a foot in diameter at the base, but rapidly increasing in width to the height of fifty or more feet, would dash rapidly along a street, or across one, picking up all sorts of small objects in its way--leaves, bits of paper, sometimes even bark and chips. At first Grace thought these whirlwinds quite picturesque, but when one of them dashed across her garden, and broke against the side of the house, and deposited much of itself through the open windows, the lover of the picturesque suddenly began to extemporize window-nettings.