Everyone suffered during the heats of July.

The chappe helped prevent the scabbard's end from being worn down and kept the sword's tip from poking through. The chappe originally meant a flap extension of the grip itself.

The myriad and mysterious interthreading of motive and action, of cause and effect, presents to the near vision no semblance of a pattern, and the whole web is so confused and meaningless that the mind grows to doubt the presence of design, and becomes skeptical of the necessity, or even the importance, of any single strand.

But I think you could safely assume that Alcott was meaner than a yalla dog about the whole thing.