which I performed in
that warm weather, was watering my flowers. Common sympathy called for
that labour. The poor things withered, and faded, and pined away; they
almost, so to say, panted for draught. Moreover, if I had not watered
them myself, I suspect that no one else would; for water last year was
nearly as precious hereabout as wine. Our land-springs were dried up;
our wells were exhausted; our deep ponds were dwindling into mud; and
geese, and ducks, and pigs, and laundresses, used to look with a jealous
and suspicious eye on the few and scanty half-buckets of that impure
element, which my trusty lacquey was fain to filch for my poor geraniums
and campanulas and tuberoses. We were forced to smuggle them in through
my faithful adherent's territories, the stable, to avoid lectures within
doors and at last even that resource failed; my garden, my blooming
garden, the joy of my eyes, was forced to go waterless like its
neighbours, and became shrivelled, scorched, and sunburnt, like them. It
really went to my heart to look at it.

On the other side of the house matters were still worse. What a dusty
world it was, when about sunset we became cool enough to creep into
it! Flowers in the court looking fit for a 'hortus siccus;' mummies of
plants, dried as in an oven; hollyhocks, once pink, turned into Quakers;
cloves smelling of dust. Oh, dusty world! May herself looked of that
complexion; so did Lizzy; so did all the houses, windows, chickens,
children, trees, and pigs in the village; so above all did the shoes.
No foot could make three plunges into that abyss of pulverised gravel,
which had the impudence to call itself a hard road, without being
clothed with a coat a quarter of an inch thick. Woe to white gowns! woe
to black! Drab was your only wear.

Then, when we were out of the street, what a toil it was to mount the
hill, climbing with weary steps and slow upon the brown turf by the
wayside, slippery, hot, and hard as a rock! And then if we happened to
meet a carriage coming along the middle of the road,--the bottomless
middle,--what a sandy whirlwind it was! What choking! what suffocation!
No state could be more pitiable, except indeed that of the travellers
who carried this misery about with them. I shall never forget the plight
in which we met the coach one evening in last August, full an hour after
its time, steeds and driver, carriage and passengers, all one dust. The
outsides, and the horses, and the coachma