Quickly she uprooted many delicate, graceful vines which she had planted to train against the sides of her own house, and replaced them with seeds of more rampant varieties. For days she made a single room of the house fairly endurable by keeping in it a large block of ice, brought from the ice-house by Philip in mid-morning; but the season's stock of the ice-house had not been estimated with a view to such drafts, so for the sake of the "truck" in cold storage she felt obliged to discontinue the practice. Wet linen sheets hung near the windows and open doors afforded some relief; but when other sufferers heard of them and learned their cost, and ejaculated "Goodness me!" or something of similar meaning, Grace was compelled to feel aristocratic and uncomfortable. She expressed to Caleb and to Doctor Taggess her pity for sufferers by the heat, and asked whether nothing could be done in alleviation. "My dear woman, they don't suffer as much as you imagine," the Doctor replied. "In the first place, they are accustomed to the climate, as you are not; most of them were born in it. Another cooling fact is that neither men nor women wear as much clothing in hot weather as you Eastern people. They, or most of them, are always hard at work, and therefore always perspiring, which is nature's method of keeping people fairly comfortable in hot weather. I don't doubt that I suffer far more as I drive about the county, doing no harder work than holding the reins, than any farmer whom I see ploughing in the fields." "I'm very glad to hear it, for their sakes, though not for your own. But how about the sick, and the poor little babies?" "Ah, this is a sad country for sick folks, and for weaklings of any kind. Stifle in winter--roast in summer; that is about the usual way. Imagine, if you can, how an honest physician feels when he's called to cases of sickness in some houses that you've seen." "Caleb," Grace said, "was it as hot in the South, during the war, as it is out here?" "No," said Caleb, promptly, "though the Eastern men complained a great deal." "What did the soldiers do when they became sick in hot weather?" "They died, generally, unless they was shipped up North, or to some of the big camps of hospitals, where they could get special attention." "But until then were there no ways of shielding them from the heat of the sun?" "Oh, yes. If the camp hospital was a tent, it had a fly--an extra thickness of canvas, stretched across it to shade the roof an' sides. Then, if any woods was near by, and usually there was,--there's more woodland in old Virginia than in this new state,--some forked sticks an' poles an' leafy tree-boughs would be fetched in, an' fixed so that the ground for eight or ten feet around would be shady." "Do you remember just how it was done?" "Do I? Well, I reckon I was on details at that sort o' work about as often as anybody."