Mrs. Hill laid the bonnet of Mrs. Troost on her “spare bed,” and covered it with a little pale-blue crape shawl, kept especially for such occasions; and, taking from the drawer of the bureau a large fan of turkey feathers, she presented it to her guest, saying, “A very warm day, isn’t it?”

“O, dreadful, dreadful!  It seems as hot as a bake oven; and I suffer with the heat all Summer, more or less.  But it’s a world of suffering;” and Mrs. Troost half closed her eyes, as if to shut out the terrible reality.

“Hay-making requires sunshiny weather, you know; so we must put up with it,” said Mrs. Hill; “besides, I can mostly find some cool place about the house; I keep my sewing here on the porch, and, as I bake my bread or cook my dinner, manage to catch it up sometimes, and so keep from getting overheated; and then, too, I get a good many stitches taken in the course of the day.”

“This is a nice cool place—­completely curtained with vines,” said Mrs. Troost; and she sighed again.  “They must have cost you a great deal of pains.”

“O, no! no trouble at all; morning-glories grow themselves; they only require to be planted.  I will save seed for you this Fall, and next Summer you can have your porch as shady as mine.”

“And if I do, it would not signify,” said Mrs. Troost; “I never get time to sit down from one week’s end to another; besides, I never had any luck with vines.  Some folks don’t, you know.”

Mrs. Hill was a woman of a short, plethoric habit; one that might be supposed to move about with little agility, and to find excessive warmth rather inconvenient; but she was of a happy, cheerful temperament; and when it rained she tucked up her skirts, put on thick shoes, and waddled about the same as ever, saying to herself, “This will make the grass grow,” or, “It will bring on the radishes,” or something else equally consolatory.

Mrs. Troost, on the contrary, was a little thin woman, who looked as though she could move about nimbly at any .season; but, as she herself often said, she was a poor, unfortunate creature, and pitied herself a great deal, as she was in justice bound to do, for nobody else cared, she said, how much she had to bear.

They were near neighbors, these good women, but their social interchanges of tea-drinking were not of very frequent occurrence, for sometimes Mrs. Troost had nothing to wear like other folks; sometimes it was too hot and sometimes it was too cold; and then, again, nobody wanted to see her, and she was sure she didn’t want to go where she wasn’t wanted.  Moreover, she had such a great barn of a house as no other woman ever had to take care of.  But in all the neighborhood it was called the big house, so Mrs. Troost was in some measure compensated for the pains it cost her.  It was, however, as she said, a barn of a place, with half the rooms unfurnished, partly because they had no use for them, and partly because they were unable to get furniture.  So it stood right in the sun, with no shutters, and no trees about it, and Mrs. Troost said she didn’t suppose it ever would have.  She was always opposed to building it; but she never had her way about any thing.  Nevertheless, some people said Mr. Troost had taken the dimensions of his house with his wife’s apron-strings—­but that may have been slander.