Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

I worked until five o’clock. When I was quite exhausted and terribly thirsty. I could hardly wait, it seemed until I got back to “my” spring; but I missed it, and had to go back. I drank to the bursting point.; I drove on to Smithport where I planned to get supper. The air had cleared after the rain, and the sky was brilliantly blue, and spattered with huge brilliantly sunlit clouds. I had to stop at one point, climb a hillside, and fill my eyes with the scene to the west, where the sunlight came low over the hills, catching only the tops of the trees on places. Some of the cloud fragments above were so completely saturated with light, as to be almost as brilliant as the sun itself. ; The sky behind the hill to the east, was a blue of an intensity I cannot remember to have seen before. ; I ate at the dining car in Smithport, and thoroughly enjoyed it. They had tables here as well as a counter, which I gratefully used. Two men were collecting the money from a record player, and changing the records. When they were done, they played some of the records, hot jazz, which tired as I was seemed to strike the right mood in me (I wonder if jazz is indeed for tired frayed nerves?); The woman in attendance here was disfigured by a total absence of a lower jaw, but she was a kindly person. ; Below Eldred, I picked up a boy, who started talking at once. He delivered bread for his mother (his father was permantly (sic) injured in a steel-mill) – a woman customer who owed him 25¢ for bread, and if he could collect it from her, he was allowed to go to a carnival at Eldred. When we got to that village he saw that