On those hot night when sleep is always just around the corner, Mrs. Appleyard likes to say over Henley's 'Ballade in Hot Weather,'
that list of cool, refreshing things that begins:
'Fountains that frisk and sprinkle
The moss they overspill;
Pools that the breezes crinkle;
The wheel beside the mill
With its wet, weed frill;
Wind shadows in the wheat,
A water cart in the street......'
Suddenly one June night --
one of those nights when maple leaves rustle like hot silk --
she remembered that watering carts had vanished. How many years ago was it
that the last one visited the corner of Blackthorn Road and
paused in the shade of the trailing elm branches for its morning drink?
Ten? Fifteen? Mrs. Appleyard could not remember, but she knew how cool
the water sounded as it splashed and gurgled into the empty tank.
How placid the driver was as he read the paper in the shade! He never hurried away even after he had turned off the water and detached the limp and dripping canvas hose from the tap. He was old and slow with a drooping moustache as white and drooping and shaggy as his horse. He had blue eyes as faded and misty as the blue paint of his cart --
that blue of ancient wheelbarrows that have stood for years in sun and rain.
Children would sit on the curbstone and hold their bare toes under the dribble of the sprinkler. Sometimes a lucky one would be permitted to mount the seat beside the driver and, as the horse ambled off with a lurch and a rumble of wheels, be allowed to pull the string that started the fans of cool stinging spray. How refreshing it sounded as it turned the glaring white dust to slimy, gray mud and trickled into the gutter making little worms of moisture in the dryness! What a wave of cool damp air it sent into sun-parched rooms!
The watering cart has been improved away with waist lines with stiff belts around them and pins in the back that caught unwary fingers, French pugs, leg-o'-mutton sleeves, porter-house steak for breakfast, sleighbells and lambrequins.
There were old ladies then and they wore lace caps. Thrift and generosity were both virtues and could live in the same house.
If a man's egg was boiled too long, he could...................
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