I’ve discovered a curious ‘country fair’ story, “Air” by Myrta Alice Little. Her story was published a few months after she had two long visits from H.P. Lovecraft in summer 1921, when there was a faint prospect of marriage in the air. “Air” has an interesting if slight resemblance to Lovecraft’s later “Cool Air” (March 1926).

At this late date it’s somewhat difficult for a modern reader to parse the story while reading it, but here’s a plain plot summary which may help make more sense of it the first time around…

A wife visiting a summer State Fair as a competitor requires a room with four windows. She feels she’d die without ’em, due to the lack of cool air in the night. (This was before the era of air conditioning units). The head of the Fair has a Committee to allocate rooms efficiently to visitors, and the head of this committee reluctantly finds the wife and her husband such a rare thing. Especially rare in the hot and crowded summer season. On then finally going to bed the wife demands the husband open all the windows, but he finds them all sealed tightly shut by some mysterious force. In desperation to please his wife he smashes the glass bookcases in the dark of the night. As a result the wife is convinced that cool air must be circulating, and she dozes off blissfully ‘like a contented cat’. Only the next day does she discover that the windows had all remained sealed. The Room Committee chairman had let them have his sealed house which had four windows, his family having departed for the summer and thus tightly shut up the house (presumably nailing the windows, which one could do in those days of sturdy wood frames). The wife is suitably chastened by the experience, and the husband is glad to pay for the damages.