rees, the locusts chirred
and chirred a tireless, vibrating panegyric on hot weather. The birds
were hushed; sometimes under a clump of matted leaves one of the
feathered gentry might be seen with wings well held out from his
panting sides. The beautiful green beetle, here called the "June-bug,"
hovered about the beds of thyme, its jeweled, enameled green body and
its silver gauze wings flashing in the sun, although June was far down
the revolving year. Blue and lilac lizards basked in the garden walks,
which were cracked by the heat. Little stir was in the streets; the
languid business of a small town was transacted if absolute need
required, and postponed if a morrow would admit of contemplation. The
voters slowly repaired to the polls with a sense of martyrdom in the
cause of party, and the election was passing off in a most orderly
fashion, there being no residuum of energy in the baking town to
render it disorderly or unseemly. Often not a human being was to be
seen, coming or going.

To Theodosia it was all vastly different from the picture she had
projected of Colbury with an election in progress. In interest,
movement, populousness, it did not compare with a county-court day,
which her imagination had multiplied when she estimated the relative
importance of the events. She had made no allowance for the absence of
the country people, specially wont to visit the town when the
quarterly court was in session, but now all dutifully in place voting
in their own remote districts. The dust, the suffocating heat, the
stale, vapid air, the indescribable sense of a lower level--all these
affected her like a veritable burden, accustomed as she was to the
light and rare mountain breeze, to the tempered sun, the mist, and the
cloud. The new and untried conditions of town life trammeled and
constrained her. She had a certain pride, and she feared she
continually offended against the canons of metropolitan taste. In
every passing face she saw surprise, and she fancied contempt. In
every casual laugh she heard ridicule. Her brain was a turmoil of
conflicting anxieties, hopes, resolutions, and in addition these
external demands upon her attention served to intensify her absorbing
emotions and to irritate her nerves rather than to divert or soothe
them. She had escaped from the relative at whose house she was making
a visit, craftily timed to include election day, on the plea that she
wished to see something of the town. "Ye don'