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Page 36
Clover pacified her as well as she could, by assurances that it was not a
dinner-party, and they were only asked to meet one girl whom Mrs. Hope
wanted her to know.
"If it were a large affair, I am sure you would have been asked too," she
said, and so left her "old woman of the sea" partly consoled.
It was the most lovely evening possible, as Clover and Phil walked down
the street toward Dr. Hope's. Soft shadows lay over the lower spurs of the
ranges. The canyons looked black and deep, but the peaks still glittered
in rosy light. The mesa was in shadow, but the nearer plain lay in full
sunshine, hot and yellow, and the west wind was full of mountain
fragrance.
Phil gave little skips as he went along. Already he seemed like a
different boy. All the droop and languor had gone, and given place to an
exhilaration which half frightened Clover, who had constant trouble in
keeping him from doing things which she knew to be imprudent. Dr. Hope had
warned her that invalids often harmed themselves by over-exertion under
the first stimulus of the high air.
"Why, how queer!" she exclaimed, stopping suddenly before one of the
pretty places just above Mrs. Marsh's boarding-house.
"What?"
"Don't you see? That yard! When we came by here yesterday it was all green
grass and rose-bushes, and girls were playing croquet; and now, look, it's
a pond!"
Sure enough! There were the rose-bushes still, and the croquet arches; but
they were standing, so to speak, up to their knees in pools of water,
which seemed several inches deep, and covered the whole place, with the
exception of the flagged walks which ran from the gates to the front and
side doors of the house. Clover noticed now, for the first time, that
these walks were several inches higher than the grass-beds on either side.
She wondered if they were made so on purpose, and resolved to notice if
the next place had the same arrangement.
But as they reached the next place and the next, lo! the phenomenon was
repeated and Dr. Hope's lawn too was in the same condition,--everything
was overlaid with water. They began to suspect what it must mean, and
Mrs. Hope confirmed the suspicion. It was irrigation day in Mountain
Avenue, it seemed. Every street in the town had its appointed period when
the invaluable water, brought from a long distance for the purpose, was
"laid on" and kept at a certain depth for a prescribed number of hours.
"We owe our grass and shrubs and flower-beds entirely to this
arrangement," Mrs. Hope told them. "Nothing could live through our dry
summers if we did not have the irrigating system."
"Are the summers so dry?" asked Clover. "It seems to me that we have had a
thunder-storm almost every day since we came."
"We do have a good many thunderstorms," Mrs. Hope admitted; "but we can't
depend on them for the gardens."
"And did you ever hear such magnificent thunder?" asked Dr. Hope.
"Colorado thunder beats the world."
"Wait till you see our magnificent Colorado hail," put in Mrs. Hope,
wickedly. "That beats the world, too. It cuts our flowers to pieces, and
sometimes kills the sheep on the plains. We are very proud of it. The
doctor thinks everything in Colorado perfection."
"I have always pitied places which had to be irrigated," remarked Clover,
with her eyes fixed on the little twin-lakes which yesterday were lawns.
"But I begin to think I was mistaken. It's very superior, of course, to
have rains; but then at the East we sometimes don't have rain when we want
it, and the grass gets dreadfully yellow. Don't you remember, Phil, how
hard Katy and I worked last summer to keep the geraniums and fuschias
alive in that long drought? Now, if we had had water like this to come
once a week, and make a nice deep pond for us, how different it would have
been!"
"Oh, you must come out West for real comfort," said Dr. Hope. "The East is
a dreadfully one-horse little place, anyhow."
"But you don't mean New York and Boston when you say 'one-horse little
place,' surely?"
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