"Oh yes, we've got to stand it," said Penelope,
with the quaint modern American fatalism.
X.
IT was late June, almost July, when Corey took up his life
in Boston again, where the summer slips away so easily.
If you go out of town early, it seems a very long
summer when you come back in October; but if you stay,
it passes swiftly, and, seen foreshortened in its flight,
seems scarcely a month's length. It has its days of heat,
when it is very hot, but for the most part it is cool,
with baths of the east wind that seem to saturate the soul
with delicious freshness. Then there are stretches of grey
westerly weather, when the air is full of the sentiment
of early autumn, and the frying, of the grasshopper
in the blossomed weed of the vacant lots on the Back
Bay is intershot with the carol of crickets; and the
yellowing leaf on the long slope of Mt. Vernon Street
smites the sauntering observer with tender melancholy.
The caterpillar, gorged with the spoil of the lindens
on Chestnut, and weaving his own shroud about him in his
lodgment on the brick-work, records the passing of summer
by mid-July; and if after that comes August, its breath
is thick and short, and September is upon the sojourner
before he has fairly had time to philosophise the character
of the town out of season.
But it must have appeared that its most characteristic
feature was the absence of everybody he knew.
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