a visitor, a guest; this was Hattie
Campbell. Mr. Campbell was away upon a business trip, and Lloyd had
arranged to have the little girl spend the fortnight of his absence
with her at Medford.

The summer was delightful. A vast, pervading warmth lay close over all
the world. The trees, the orchards, the rose-bushes in the garden about
the house, all the teeming life of trees and plants hung motionless and
poised in the still, tideless ocean of the air. It was very quiet; all
distant noises, the crowing of cocks, the persistent calling of robins
and jays, the sound of wheels upon the road, the rumble of the trains
passing the station down in the town, seemed muffled and subdued. The
long, calm summer days succeeded one another in an unbroken, glimmering
procession. From dawn to twilight one heard the faint, innumerable
murmurs of the summer, the dull bourdon of bees in the rose and lilac
bushes, the prolonged, strident buzzing of blue-bottle-flies, the harsh,
dry scrape of grasshoppers, the stridulating of an occasional cricket.
In the twilight and all through the night itself the frogs shrilled from
the hedgerows and in the damp, north corners of the fields, while from
the direction of the hills toward the east the whippoorwills called
incessantly. During the day the air was full of odours, distilled as it
were by the heat of high noon--the sweet smell of ripening apples, the
fragrance of warm sap and leaves and growing grass, the smell of cows
from the nearby pastures, the pungent, ammoniacal suggestion of the
stable back of the house, and the odour of scorching paint blistering on
the southern walls.

July was very hot. No breath of wind stirred the vast, invisible sea of
air, quivering and oily under the vertical sun. The landscape was
deserted of animated life; there was little stirring abroad. In the
house one kept within the cool, darkened rooms with matting on the
floors and comfortable, deep wicker chairs, the windows wide to the
least stirring of the breeze. Adler dozed in his canvas hammock slung
between a hitching-post and a crab-apple tree in the shade behind the
stable. Kamiska sprawled at full length underneath the water-trough, her
tongue lolling, panting incessantly. An immeasurable Sunday stillness
seemed to hang suspended in the atmosphere--a drowsy, numbing hush.
There was no thought of the passing of time. The day of the week was
always a matter of conjecture. It seemed as though this life of heat