IRTEEN.

AT HOME AGAIN.

It was a bright August day at Endleigh.

There was a scent of new-mown hay in the air, and gangs of reapers were
out in the fields getting in the harvest, the whirr of the threshing-
machine, which the squire had lately brought down from London, making a
hideous din in the meadows by the pond, where it had been set up;
puffing and panting away as if its very existence were a trial, and
scandalising the old-fashioned village folk--who did not believe in such
new-fangled notions, and thought a judgment would come on those having
to do with the machine, depriving, as it did, honest men who could wield
the flail of a job!

In the garden of the vicarage, the warm sun seemed to incubate a dreamy
stillness, the butterflies hardly taking the trouble to fly, and the
very flowers hanging down their lazy heads; while the trees drooping
their leaves, as if faint and exhausted with the heat.

Everything out of doors looked asleep, taking a mid-day siesta.
Everything, that is, but the bees, which carried on their honey-
gathering business as briskly as ever, utterly impervious to the warmth.
Indeed, perhaps they got on all the better for it, probing the petals
of the white lilies yet in bloom, and investigating the cavities of the
foxglove and wonderful spider-trap of the Australian balsam, or else
sweeping the golden dust off the discs of the gorgeous sunflowers, a
regular mine of mellifluent wealth; a host of gnats and wasps and other
idle insects buzzing round them all the time and pretending to be busy
too, but really doing nothing at all!

The heat-laden atmosphere was so still that it had that oily sort of
haze that distinguishes the mirage in the East, when the air appears
composed of little waving lines wavering to and fro that dazzle your
eyes with their almost-imperceptible motion as you look at them; and the
silence was unbroken save by the chuck-chuck-chuck of some meddlesome
blackbird in the shrubbery annoying the sparrows in their nap, and the
answering click-clink-tweedle-deedle-dum-tum-tweedle-um of the yellow-
hammer, telling as plainly as the little songster could tell that he at
all events was wide awake, while, in the far distance, there could be
heard the coo of ring-doves and the melancholy lament of the cuckoo
investigating the hedgerows in quest of other birds' nests wherein to
lay its solitary egg, and finding itself forestalled at every turn!

But if everything was so quiet w