weather, just as we used to exclaim against the warm. 'What a
change from last year!' is the first sentence you hear, go where you
may. Everybody remarks it, and everybody complains of it; and yet
in my mind it has its advantages, or at least its compensations, as
everything in nature has, if we would only take the trouble to seek
for them.

Last year, in spite of the love which we are now pleased to profess
towards that ardent luminary, not one of the sun's numerous admirers
had courage to look him in the face: there was no bearing the world
till he had said 'Good-night' to it. Then we might stir: then we
began to wake and to live. All day long we languished under his
influence in a strange dreaminess, too hot to work, too hot to read,
too hot to write, too hot even to talk; sitting hour after hour in a
green arbour, embowered in leafiness, letting thought and fancy
float as they would. Those day-dreams were pretty things in their
way; there is no denying that. But then, if one half of the world
were to dream through a whole summer, like the sleeping Beauty in
the wood, what would become of the other?

The only office requiring the slightest exertion, which I performed
in that warm weather, was watering my flowers. Common sympathy
called for that labour. The poor things withered, and faded, and
pined away; they almost, so to say, panted for draught. Moreover,
if I had not watered them myself, I suspect that no one else would;
for water last year was nearly as precious hereabout as wine. Our
land-springs were dried up; our wells were exhausted; our deep ponds
were dwindling into mud; and geese, and ducks, and pigs, and
laundresses, used to look with a jealous and suspicious eye on the
few and scanty half-buckets of that impure element, which my trusty