from Pleasure Bay in the carriage, feeling lazy and kind of
half sea-sick.

That night I dreamed that a whole regiment of green lobsters were
crawling over my bed, clawing at me fiercely as they went. Then I
thought that Mr. Burke came and shoved them off with both arms flung
out, and invited me to breakfast on a heap of empty shells, dipped in
butter, which set awful heavy on my stomach.

In fact, I had a worrying night, and got up feeling as if I had been
feasting on tenpenny nails and roasted flat-irons.

XCVII.

ONE HOUR OF HEAVEN.

Dear sisters:--You haven't the least idea of what warm weather is in
Vermont. Why, if one of your mountain trout streams could have run
through New York, it would have boiled over and cooked the poor little
speckled creatures that live in its waves. You never saw anything like
it in your born days. The sea breezes at Long Branch seemed to come over
an ocean of melted lead, blasted up by some old furnace of a volcano.
For one whole week I was just dying of envy, when I thought of the pigs
roving loose in our village, with such lovely mud puddles to lie down
in, without caring a sumarke whether their clothes were mussed--excuse
that word, I got it here in York--or not.

While I was panting for breath on the sea-shore, I could think of them,
with home-sick longing, up to their throats in the soft, mushy fluid of
a delicious puddle, with swarms of yellow butterflies rising, floating,
and settling around them, as if a bed of primroses had got tired of
growing in one place, and had burst off on a grand spree through the
air, settling down for a drink now and then.

Yes, sisters, I was brought, in the hot blast of those summer days, to a
state of unchristian envy, and would have been glad to swap places with
flounders, or have slept in some cellar, with a block of ice for a
pillow.

But nothing that I ever saw lasts for ever, or if it does I haven't
lived long enough to prove it. Still, one gets restless in weather like
this, when human beings are dropping down dead in the streets of a city
close by in dozens, from sunstrokes.

This morning I sat in my room, with a short gown and not over many
skirts on, looking through the green slats of my door, and watching the
sunshine shimmer down on the waves where the little white vessels were
folding their sails, and going to sleep like birds too lazy for flying,
when a colored person came to my door, and says he:

"Mr. Burke's com