he sat down on my
blessed grandmother's trunk and wiped his face again. Then he waved his
dirty hand and motioned that I should go away, which I did, and found E.
E. spreading her skirts out wide on a settee, and looking as innocent as
twenty lambs if any one seemed to turn anxiously toward the extra seat
she was covering up for me.

I took the seat thankfully, spread my parasol, and tried to catch a
mouthful of air, but there wasn't a breath stirring. The water in the
harbor was smooth as a looking-glass. The sky was broad, blue, and so
hot with sunshine that it blistered one's face to look up.

I put a blue veil around my beehive, and wilted down into my corner of
the settee. Dempster stood by us blowing himself with a broad-brimmed
hat, but not a breath of air he got.

"I'll run down and see how the thermometer is," says he. "Never--never
did I swelter under such a stifler in my life."

Off he went, swinging his hat. In a few minutes he came back again,
panting with the heat.

"It's a hundred," says he.

"What?" says I.

"The thermometer," says he.

"And is it that which makes things so hot?"

"Of course," says he, "one hundred is as much as we can bear."

"Then, why on earth don't they get rid of some? What is the use of
piling-up things to this extent? For my part I never will travel on
boats that carry these red-hot thermometers again. It's as much as one's
life is worth. Nitro-glycerine is nothing to it; that blows you right
straight up, but these other things pile on the heat and never come to
an end."

Congress ought to put a stop to such dangerous freights being piled-up
in steamboats. It's enough to breed suicides on the water.

Dempster wanted to laugh, I could see that, but his face just puckered
up a little, and it was all he could do in that line. So he took a
camp-stool, pulled his new white hat over his eyes, and fell into a
soggy sort of sleep. There he sat, kind of simmering, like a baked apple
in the mouth of an oven, till the steamboat stopped on the end of a
sand-bank, and gave a lazy snarl, as if it was glad to get rid of us.

After this they packed the whole cargo of live people in a line of cars,
and sent them off sweltering through the sand with the engine roaring
before them like a fiery dragon.

LXXIX.

AT THE BRANCH.

By and by, we came to Long Branch, where the engine gave another long
whoop, and were turned out into the sunshine again among stages, wagons,
ca