following day:

APPALLING SUICIDE. PETER PUPKIN POISONED.

He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public
enquiry and that the question of Browning's poetry and whether it is
altogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fully
ventilated in the newspapers.

Thinking of that, Pupkin came to the main corner.

On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is
all a blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda-water
fountain half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so
many people--boys and girls and old people too--all drinking
sarsaparilla and chocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks
that you take out of long straws. There is such a laughing and a
talking as you never heard, and the girls are all in white and pink
and cambridge blue, and the soda fountain is of white marble with
silver taps, and it hisses and sputters, and Jim Eliot and his
assistant wear white coats with red geraniums in them, and it's just
as gay as gay.

The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if
it can compare with the inside of Eliot's drug store in Mariposa--for
real gaiety and joy of living.

This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday
and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course,
Smith's. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drug