The long avenue might well have been mistaken for a colony of invalids and listless convalescents. Damp and languid citizens, their coats over bared forearms, made their painful way homeward from downtown, mopping fiery brows and throats; other coatless citizens, arrived at home, reclined melting in wicker rocking-chairs upon their verandas or lawns, likewise mopping as they melted; while beside them their wives and daughters, in flimsiest white, sat fanning plaintively. Here and there the stout father of a family stood near his front fence and played a weak and tepid stream from the garden hose over his lawn, or sprinkled the street, while his children, too hot to be importunate, begged lifelessly to relieve him of the task. The leaves of the massed foliage that made the street a green tunnel hung flaccidly gilding in the sun; and the sun abated not at all as it approached its setting. The air drooped upon the people with a weight too heavy to let them move readily, yet for breathing there seemed to be no air; and it had no motion, so that the transparent bits of paper, where the popcorn man or the hokey-pokey man had passed, lay in the street and on the sidewalks as still as so much lead. “Seem like ev’thing wilted down flat,” Mr. Shelby’s fat coachman remarked as they turned into the driveway at home. “Me, I reckon if you’s to take little slim string o’ cobweb up on the roof an’ push ’er off, she’d fall ri’ down on the groun’ same as a flatiron. Look fountain, Mist’ Shelby!” He laughed happily, and waved his whip toward the bronze swan. “That duck, let alone he ain’t got stren’f ’nough to spout, he ain’t but jes’ hodly able to goggle his th’oat little bit.” The swan was indeed put to it to eject a faint spray, for all over the town the people were making such demands on the water, already low with the dry season, that the depleted river whence it came threatened to disappear unless the drought were broken. However, neither drought nor heat had to do with Mr. Shelby’s peevishness, which visibly increased when the carriage turned into his driveway;—what made him frown so bitterly was the sight of his daughter, charmingly dressed in fabrics of gossamer weight, her shapely hands gloved in spite of the weather, and her hazel eyes bright under a hat of ivory lace. She was sitting upon a wicker bench on the big veranda, but when the lathered bay horses trotted through the driveway gate, she jumped up and hurried to meet her father as he stepped out upon a stone horseblock near the veranda steps. “Papa!” she cried, “you must hurry; we’re terribly late! I wouldn’t have waited for you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t go unless I took you.” “I wouldn’t,” he said grimly. “You bet your sweet life I wouldn’t!” “_Won’t_ you hurry?” she urged. “What for? Ain’t I dressed up enough? All I’m goin’ to do is wash my hands.” “Then do,” she cried, as he moved to go indoors. “_Please_ hurry!”