has persisted in reading me some of Georgiana's letters, written
from the home of that New York cousin, whose mother they are now
visiting. I didn't like _him_ particularly. Sylvia relates that
he was a favorite of her father's.

The dull month passes to-day. One thing I have secretly wished to
learn; did her brother cut Georgiana's toes entirely off?



VIII


In August the pale and delicate poetry of the Kentucky land makes
itself felt as silence and repose. Still skies, still woods, still
sheets of forest water, still flocks and herds, long lanes winding
without the sound of a traveller through fields of the universal
brooding stillness. The sun no longer blazing, but muffled in a
veil of palest blue. No more black clouds rumbling and rushing up
from the horizon, but a single white one brushing slowly against
the zenith like the lost wing of a swan. Far beneath it the
silver-breasted hawk, using the cloud as his lordly parasol. The
eagerness of spring gone, now all but incredible as having ever
existed; the birds hushed and hiding; the bee, so nimble once,
fallen asleep over his own cider-press in the shadow of the golden
apple. From the depths of the woods may come the notes of the
cuckoo; but they strike the air more and more slowly, like the
clack, clack of a distant wheel that is being stopped at the close
of harvest. The whirring wings of the locust let themselves go
in one long wave of sound, passing into silence. All nature is a