day of almost American heat. The mercury never went above eighty-three
degrees, but the blood mounted ten degrees higher; though I think a good
deal of the heat imparted itself through the eye from the lurid horizons
paling upward into the dull, unbroken blue of the heavens, ordinarily
overcast or heaped with masses of white cloud. A good deal came also
from the thronged streets, in which the season had scarcely begun to
waver, and the pulses of the plethoric town throbbed with a sense of
choking fulness. The feverish activity of the cabs contributed to the
effect of the currents and counter-currents, as they insinuated
themselves into every crevice of the frequent "blocks," where the
populations of the bus-tops, deprived in their arrest of the artificial
movement of air, sweltered in the sun, and the classes in private
carriages of every order and degree suffered in a helpless equality with
the perspiring masses.

Suddenly all London had burst into a passion of straw hats; and where
one lately saw only the variance from silken cylinders to the different
types of derbies and fedoras, there was now the glisten of every shape
of panama, tuscan, and chip head-gear, with a prevalence of the low,
flat-topped hard-brimmed things that mocked with the rigidity of
sheet-iron the conception of straw as a light and yielding material. Men
with as yet only one foot in the grave can easily remember when the
American picked himself out in the London crowd by his summer hat, but
now, in his belated conformity to an extinct ideal, his head is apt to
be one of the few cylindered or derbied heads in the swarming
processions of Piccadilly or the paths in the Park. No shape of straw
hat is peculiar to any class, but the slouching panama is for pecuniary
reasons more the wear of rank and wealth. With a brim flared up in front
and scooped down behind, it justifies its greater acceptance with youth;
age and middle-age wear its weave and the tuscan braid in the fedora