driver, carriage and passengers, all one dust. The outsides, and
the horses, and the coachman, seemed reduced to a torpid quietness,
the resignation of despair. They had left off trying to better
their condition, and taken refuge in a wise and patient
hopelessness, bent to endure in silence the extremity of ill. The
six insides, on the contrary, were still fighting against their
fate, vainly struggling to ameliorate their hapless destiny. They
were visibly grumbling at the weather, scolding at the dust, and
heating themselves like a furnace, by striving against the heat.
How well I remember the fat gentleman without his coat, who was
wiping his forehead, heaving up his wig, and certainly uttering that
English ejaculation, which, to our national reproach, is the phrase
of our language best known on the continent. And that poor boy,
red-hot, all in a flame, whose mamma, having divested her own person
of all superfluous apparel, was trying to relieve his sufferings by
the removal of his neckerchief--an operation which he resisted with
all his might. How perfectly I remember him, as well as the pale
girl who sat opposite, fanning herself with her bonnet into an
absolute fever! They vanished after a while into their own dust;
but I have them all before my eyes at this moment, a companion
picture to Hogarth's 'Afternoon,' a standing lesson to the grumblers
at cold summers.

For my part, I really like this wet season. It keeps us within, to
be sure, rather more than is quite agreeable; but then we are at
least awake and alive there, and the world out of doors is so much
the pleasanter when we can get abroad. Everything does well, except
those fastidious bipeds, men and women; corn ripens, grass grows,
fruit is plentiful; there is no lack of birds to eat it, and there
has not been such a wasp-season these dozen years. My garden wants