SUMMER TIME IN OLD VIRGINIA.

Western Star, Issue 930, 14 March 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

SUMMER TIME IN OLD VIRGINIA.

An English parson’s idea of summer is of luzy sunshiny hours spent in the open air. But with us all this is changed. Shall we forsake our comparatively cool and semi-dark apartments in order to be baked out of doors, where oven shade does not mean coolness ? No. Such follies as that of sitting in the garden, except on cloudy days —days which are hailed with a rapture which speaks volumes in itself—or of leaving our blinds open so that the heated air may enter and the flies disport themselves in our house, are abandoned to the stranger. And neither docs he (or she) long indulge in them. The most British of the Britishers is fain, finally to confess that there may be good reasons for customs to which he is unaccustomed. Perhaps, it is rather the length than the actual heat of a hot summer in Virginia which is found trying by some constitutions, native and foreign alike. When people at the North are being invigorated by glorious fall weather in which the mere sensation of living is a delight, we are still looking sallow and dried up, and feeling exhausted by the apparent endlessness of the “ heated term,” extending, as it occasionally does, far into October, or even November, and thus cheating us out of our fall. Without punkahs or trained servants, or in a frame-house, the very walls and furniture of which are hot to the touch, summer may become tedious. We have what is politely called “the mountain breeze,” and often we wish we had it not. It is a scorching blast which disheartens all nature, except the flies. The flowers droop and fade before it; the whole earth parches. We are liable, during the summer mouths, to more or less lengthy droughts, broken only by terrific storms; and then the lack of broad streams and lakes, and the presence of those interminable fields of scrub-grass, can scarcely be atoned for even by the beauty of the mountains, so barren and thirsty does the laud appear.— Family Magazine,