ods.

Every morning the sun invaded earlier the east windows of Laura
Dearborn's bedroom. Every day at noon it stood more nearly overhead
above her home. Every afternoon the checkered shadows of the leaves
thickened upon the drawn curtains of the library. Within doors the
bottle-green flies came out of their lethargy and droned and bumped on
the panes. The double windows were removed, screens and awnings took
their places; the summer pieces were put into the fireplaces.

All of a sudden vans invaded the streets, piled high with mattresses,
rocking-chairs, and bird cages; the inevitable "spring moving" took
place. And these furniture vans alternated with great trucks laden with
huge elm trees on their way from nursery to lawn. Families and trees
alike submitted to the impulse of transplanting, abandoning the winter
quarters, migrating with the spring to newer environments, taking root
in other soils. Sparrows wrangled on the sidewalks and built ragged
nests in the interstices of cornice and coping. In the parks one heard
the liquid modulations of robins. The florists' wagons appeared, and
from house to house, from lawn to lawn, iron urns and window boxes
filled up with pansies, geraniums, fuchsias, and trailing vines. The
flower beds, stripped of straw and manure, bloomed again, and at length
the great cottonwoods shed their berries, like clusters of tiny grapes,
over street and sidewalk.

At length came three days of steady rain, followed by cloudless
sunshine and full-bodied, vigorous winds straight from out the south.

Instantly the living embers in tree top and grass plat were fanned to
flame. Like veritable fire, the leaves blazed up. Branch after branch
caught and crackled; even the dryest, the deadest, were enfolded in the
resistless swirl of green. Tree top ignited tree top; the parks and
boulevards were one smother of radiance. From end to end and from side
to side of the city, fed by the rains, urged by the south winds, spread
billowing and surging the superb conflagration of the coming summer.

Then, abruptly, everything hung poised; the leaves, the flowers, the
grass, all at fullest stretch, stood motionless, arrested, while the
heat, distilled, as it were, from all this seething green, rose like a
vast pillar over the city, and stood balanced there in the iridescence
of the sky, moveless and immeasurable.

From time to time it appeared as if this pillar broke in the guise of
summer storms, and came top