sun-dried pebbles; the logs and loggers were drought-bound somewhere up the Connecticut; and the grass at the side of the track was burned in a hundred places by the sparks from locomotives.  Men—­hatless, coatless, and gasping—­lay in the shade of that station where only a few months ago the glass stood at 30 below zero.  Now the readings were 98 degrees in the shade.  Main Street—­do you remember Main Street of a little village locked up in the snow this spring?[2]—­had given up the business of life, and an American flag with some politician’s name printed across the bottom hung down across the street as stiff as a board.  There were men with fans and alpaca coats curled up in splint chairs in the verandah of the one hotel—­among them an ex-President of the United States.  He completed the impression that the furniture of the entire country had been turned out of doors for summer cleaning in the absence of all the inhabitants.  Nothing looks so hopelessly ‘ex’ as a President ‘returned to stores,’ The stars and stripes signified that the Presidential Campaign had opened in Main Street—­opened and shut up again.  Politics evaporate at summer heat when all hands are busy with the last of the hay, and, as the formers put it, ‘Vermont’s bound to go Republican.’  The custom of the land is to drag the scuffle and dust of an election over several months—­to the improvement of business and manners; but the noise of that war comes faintly up the valley of the Connecticut and is lost among the fiddling of the locusts.  Their music puts, as it were, a knife edge upon the heat of the day.  In truth, it is a tropical country for the time being.  Thunder-storms prowl and growl round the belted hills, spit themselves away in a few drops of rain, and leave the air more dead than before.  In the woods, where even the faithful springs are beginning to run low, the pines and balsams have thrown out all their fragrance upon the heat and wait for the wind to bring news of the rain.  The clematis, wild carrot, and all the gipsy-flowers camped by sufferance between fence line and road net are masked in white dust, and the golden-rod of the pastures that are burned to flax-colour burns too like burnished brass.  A pillar of dust on the long hog-back of the road across the hills shows where a team is lathering between farms, and the roofs of the wooden houses flicker in the haze of their own heat.  Overhead the chicken-hawk is the only creature at work, and his shrill kite-like call sends the gaping chickens from the dust-bath in haste to their mothers.  The red squirrel as usual feigns business of importance among the butternuts, but this is pure priggishness.  When the passer-by is gone he ceases chattering and climbs back to where the little breezes can stir his tail-plumes.  From somewhere under the lazy fold of a meadow comes the drone of a mowing-machine among the hay—­its whurr-oo and the grunt of the tired horses.

[Footnote 2:  See ‘In Sight of Monadnock.’]