After dinner they went out to the veranda and the gentlemen smoked. The
judge set his chair down on the ground, tilted back in it with his feet on
the steps, and blew a wavery domed city up in the air. He called it solid
comfort. He liked to sit out from under the porch roof, he said; he wanted
to see more of the sky. The others moved their chairs down to join him in
the celestial vision. There had blown across the heaven a feathery, thin
cloud or two, but save for these, there was nothing but glorious and
tender, brilliant blue. It seemed so clear and close one marvelled the
little church spire in the distance did not pierce it; yet, at the same
time, the eye ascended miles and miles into warm, shimmering ether. Far
away two buzzards swung slowly at anchor, half-way to the sun.
"'O bright, translucent, cerulean hue,
Let my wide wings drift on in you,'"
said Harkless, pointing them out to Helen.
"You seem to get a good deal of fun out of this kind of weather," observed
Lige, as he wiped his brow and shifted his chair out of the sun.
"I expect you don't get such skies as this up in Rouen," said the judge,
looking at the girl from between half-closed eyelids.
"It's the same Indiana sky, I think," she answered.
"I guess maybe in the city you don't see as much of it, or think as much
about it. Yes, they're the Indiana skies," the old man went on.
Skies as blue
As the eyes of children when they smile at you.'
"There aren't any others anywhere that ever seemed much like them to me.
They've been company for me all my life. I don't think there are any
others half as beautiful, and I know there aren't any as sociable. They
were always so." He sighed gently, and Miss Sherwood fancied his wife must
have found the Indiana skies as lovely as he had, in the days of long ago.
"Seems to me they are the softest and bluest and kindest in the world."
"I think they are," said Helen, "and they are more beautiful than the
'Italian skies,' though I doubt if many of us Hoosiers realize it; and--
certainly no one else does."
The old man leaned over and patted her hand. Harkless gasped. "'Us
Hoosiers!'" chuckled the judge. "You're a great Hoosier, young lady! How
much of your life have you spent in the State? 'Us Hoosiers!'"