d together to the porch.

The force which was driving him out of the house into the suffocating
streets was in his voice when he spoke, but honest Tom did not hear it.
After the four war years in which he had been almost sublime, the old
soldier had gradually ceased even to be human, and that vegetable calm
which envelops persons who have fallen into the habit of sitting still,
had endowed him at last with the perfect serenity of a cabbage. The only
active principle which ever moved in him was the borrowed principle of
alcohol--for when that artificial energy subsided, he sank back, as he
was beginning to do now, into the spiritual inertia which sustains those
who have outlived their capacity for the heroic.

"I ain't felt a breath," he replied, peering southward where the stars
were coming out in a cloudless sky. "I don't reckon we'll get it till on
about eleven."

"Looks as if we were in for a scorching summer, doesn't it?"

"You never can tell. There's always a spell in June." And he who had
been a hero, sat down in his cane-bottomed chair and waved the palm-leaf
fan feebly in front of him. He had had his day; he had fought his fight;
he had helped to make the history of battles--and now what remained to
him? The stainless memory of the four years when he was a hero; a
smoldering ember still left from that flaming glory which was his soul!

In the street the dust lay thick and still, and the wilted foliage of
the mulberry trees hung motionless from the great arching boughs. Only
an aspen at the corner seemed alive and tremulous, while sensitive
little shivers ran through the silvery leaves, which looked as if they
were cut out of velvet. As Oliver left the house, the town awoke slowly
from its lethargy, and the sound of laughter floated to him from the
porches behind their screens of honeysuckle or roses. But even this
laughter seemed to him to contain the burden of weariness which
oppressed and disenchanted his spirit. The pall of melancholy spread
from the winding yellow river at the foot of the hill to the procession
of cedars which stood pitch-black against the few dim stars on the
eastern horizon.

"What is the use?" he asked himself suddenly, uttering aloud that grim
question which lies always beneath the vivid, richly clustering
impressions in the imaginative mind. Of his struggle, his sacrifice--of
his art even--what was the use? A bitter despondency--the crushing
despondency of youth which age does not