That was blue in stormy weather,
Or ‘twas red,—I donno whether,
But ‘twas either one or t’ether,
Tidy-um,
Tidy-um!”
—Favourite Song of “Hard-times” Wharff.
The village sounds in Palermo that sleepy afternoon were only the “summer snorin’s,” as Marriner Amazeen used to say. There was the murmur of flies buzzing lazily around some banana, skins which curled limply in the August sun in front of Asa Brickett’s store. At the side of the building, in a patch of shade, a half-dozen old men, jack-knifed on a rickety settee, droned in intermittent conversation. From open kitchen windows along the village street came subdued sounds of the after-dinner work of the housewives—clash of cutlery and clatter of dishes. In a dusty maple whose lower branches had taken toll from passing loads of hay, a cicada shrilled his long-drawn note, like an almost interminable yawn.
“First August fiddler I’ve heard,” commented one of the old men in the shade. “As old Drew used to say in his Rural Intelligencer:
“When August’s locusts wind their horn
Then first you know, Good Summer’s gone!”