IN SEPTEMBER.
BY MARY DENSEL.
It had been a hot summer, and Cassy Deane, shut up in a close street, had been treated to every atom of heat that the city contained. So at least it seemed to her, for the family had only lately moved into town from the country, and Cassy was like a little wind-flower that had been transplanted from a cool wood into a box of earth near a blazing fire. No wonder that she drooped. She seldom had even a drive to console her.
"Because we are only middling," she explained to herself. "If we were poor, we could go on excursions with the charity children; and if we were rich, we'd travel to the mountains or the sea. We're only middling, so we stay at home."
At first Cassy was ready to envy Marion Van Dysk, who started with her mamma and a dozen trunks for Saratoga; and she breathed a sigh over the fortunes of Lillie Downs, whose father had built a cottage on the coast of Maine, where the ocean surged up to the very piazza.
But by-and-by Cassy forgot her woes, such a delightful piece of news came to her ears. Her mother told it to her one evening, and Cassy never went to sleep for two whole hours after she was in bed, so excited was she by the bliss that was to be hers in September.
The truth was that Mr. Deane had come to the city for the express purpose of giving his little daughter the benefit of no less an establishment than Madame McLeod's "Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies." Cassy knew that Marion Van Dysk and Lillie Downs and a host of other damsels were also "to enjoy its advantages." Cassy was overwhelmed with the honor and the joy of it all. She had always been a solitary chick up in her country home, and it seemed almost too good to be true that she was actually to have real live girls to play with, and that she could talk of "our games," and "our history class."
What matter that the August sun scorched and flamed? What matter if the bricks, baked through and through by day, took their revenge by keeping the air as hot as a furnace all night?