Read "Dominie Dean" by Ellis Parker Butler online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
LOOKING back, in later years, the death of old Sam Wiggett seemed to David Dean to mark the close of one epoch and the beginning of another, and the day he heard of the engagement of his daughter Alice marked a third.
It was Monday and well past noon and the heat was intense. Although he was late for dinner -- noon dinners being the rule in Riverbank -- David paused now and then as he climbed the Third Street hill, resting a few moments in the shade and fanning himself with the palm-leaf fan he carried. Where the walk was not shaded by overarching maple trees the heat beat up from the plank sidewalks in appreciable gusts. All spring he had been feeling unaccountably weary, and these hot days seemed to take the sap out of him. He had had a hard morning.