"God! What a life!" he cried suddenly. And beyond this parching desert of the present he saw again that enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom, which was Virginia. His resolution, weakened by the long hot afternoon, seemed to faint under the pressure of his longing. All the burden of the day--the heat, the languor, the scorching thirst of the fields, the brazen blue of the sky, the stillness as of a suspended breath which wrapt the town--all these things had passed into the intolerableness of his desire. He felt it like a hot wind blowing over him, and it seemed to him that he was as helpless as a leaf in the current of this wind which was sweeping him onward. Something older than his will was driving him; and this something had come to him from out the twilight, where the mimosa trees drooped like a veil against the afterglow. Taking up his hat, he left the room and descended the stairs to the wide hall where Tom Peachey sat, gasping for breath, midway of two open doors. "I'll be darned if I can make a draught," muttered the old soldier irascibly, while he picked up his alpaca coat from the balustrade, and slipped into it before going out upon the front porch into the possible presence of ladies. His usually cheerful face was clouded, for his habitual apathy had deserted him, and he had reached the painful decision that when you looked things squarely in the face there was precious little that was worth living for--a conclusion to which he had been brought by the simple accident of an overdose of Kentucky rye in his mint julep after church. The overdose had sent him to sleep too soon after his Sunday dinner, and when he had awakened from his heavy and by no means quiet slumber, he had found himself confronting a world of gloom. "I'm damned tired making the best of things, if you want to know what is the matter with me," he had remarked crossly to his wife. "The idea, Mr. Peachey! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" that sprightly lady had responded while she prepared herself for her victory over Cyrus. "Well, I ain't," honest Tom had retorted. "I've gone on pretending for fifty years and I'm going to stop it. What good has it done, anyway? It hasn't put a roof on, has it?" "I told you you oughtn't to go to sleep right on top of your dinner," she had replied soothingly. "I declare you're perfectly purple. I never saw you so upset. Here, take this palm-leaf fan and go and see if you can't find a draught. You know it's downright sinful to talk that way after the Lord has been so good to you." But Philosophy, though she is unassailable when she clings to her safeguard of the universal, meets her match whenever she descends to an open engagement with the particular. "W-what's He done for me?" demanded not Tom, but the whiskey inside of him.