pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the
foot-passengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of
the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though
there were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul, they
held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there
they showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat
unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before
his death-white flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with
the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying
huskily to the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My
hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart--" But still the
multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading,
vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the
side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the
beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal
lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to
be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though
there was no reason for this,--looked on it amazed, and at last their own
errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of
purpose, they cried with one voice, that it was a hideous sight, and
strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the
soda-fountain sparkled.

It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a
thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with a
maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven
degrees!" Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of
people, each pausing at the shrine of heat; before he tossed off the
hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from either
side of the fountain. Then in the order of their coming they issued