It was a morning of the warmest week
of mid-July, and Canaan lay inert
and helpless beneath a broiling sun.
The few people who moved about
the streets went languidly, keeping
close to the wall on the shady side; the women in
thin white fabrics; the men, often coatless, carrying
palm-leaf fans, and replacing collars with
handkerchiefs. In the Court-house yard the maple
leaves, gray with blown dust and grown to great
breadth, drooped heavily, depressing the long,
motionless branches with their weight, so low that
the four or five shabby idlers, upon the benches
beneath, now and then flicked them sleepily with
whittled sprigs. The doors and windows of the
stores stood open, displaying limp wares of trade,
but few tokens of life; the clerks hanging over dim
counters as far as possible from the glare in front,
gossiping fragmentarily, usually about the Cory
murder, and, anon, upon a subject suggested by
the sight of an occasional pedestrian passing
perspiring by with scrooged eyelids and purpling skin.
From street and sidewalk, transparent hot waves
swam up and danced themselves into nothing;
while from the river bank, a half-mile away, came
a sound hotter than even the locust's midsummer
rasp: the drone of a planing-mill. A chance boy,
lying prone in the grass of the Court-house yard,
was annoyed by the relentless chant and lifted his
head to mock it: "AWR-EER-AWR-EER! SHUT UP,