toes of the little street children, who creep about, sheltering their
eyes with their hands, and keeping in the shade when it is possible.
The apple-women crouch close to the wall, under their green umbrellas;
the banana-sellers look yellow and wilted as their own wares. Men pass
along, hurrying, because they are Americans, and business must go on
whether it be hot or cold; but they move in a dogged jog-trot,
expressive of weariness and disgust, and wipe their brows as they go,
muttering anathemas under their breath on the whole summer season.
Most of the men are in linen coats, some in no coats at all; all wear
straw hats, and there is a great display of palm-leaf fans, waving in
all degrees of energy. Here and there is seen an umbrella, but these
are not frequent, for it seems to the American a strange and womanish
thing to carry an umbrella except for rain; it also requires
attention, and takes a man's mind off his business. Each man of all
the hurrying thousands is shut up in himself, carrying his little
world, which is all the world there is, about with him, seeing the
other hurrying mites only "as trees walking," with no thought or note
of them. Who cares about anybody else when it is so hot? Get through
the day's work, and away to the wife and children in the cool by the
sea-shore, or in the comfortable green suburb, where, if one must
still be hot, one can at least suffer decently, and not "like a
running river be,"--with apologies to the boy Chatterton.

Among all these hurrying motes in the broad, fierce stream of
sunshine, one figure moves slowly, without haste. Nobody looks at
anybody else, or this figure might attract some attention, even in the
streets of the great city. An old man, tall and slender, with snowy
hair falling in a single curl over his forehead; with brown eyes which
glance birdlike here and there, seeing everything, taking in every
face, every shadow of a vanishing form that hurries along and away