, for here it is summer again and the flowers are all in bloom! You
sink farther and farther into your chair and debate with yourself
whether you ought to run like a coward or stay and die like a hero. One
of your legs goes to sleep and the rest of you envies the leg. You can
feel your whiskers growing, and you begin to itch in two hundred
separate places, but can't scratch.

The strangest thing about it is that those round you appear to be
enjoying it. Incredible though it seems, they are apparently finding
pleasure in this. You can tell that they are enjoying themselves because
they begin to act as real music-lovers always act under such
circumstances--some put their heads on one side and wall up their eyes
in a kind of dying-calf attitude and listen so hard you can hear them
listening, and some bend over toward their nearest neighbors and murmur
their rapture. It is all right for them to murmur, but if you so much as
scrooge your feet, or utter a low, despairing moan or anything, they all
turn and glare at you reproachfully and go "Sh!" like a collection of
steam-heating fixtures. Depend on them to keep you in your place!

[Illustration: "SHE TRIES TO TEAR ALL ITS FRONT TEETH OUT WITH HER BARE
HANDS"]

All of a sudden the lady operator comes out of her trance. She comes out
of it with a violent start, as though she had just been bee-stung. She
now cuts loose, regardless of the piano's intrinsic value and its
associations to its owners. She skitters her flying fingers up and down
the instrument from one end to the other, producing a sound like
hailstones falling on a tin roof. She grabs the helpless thing by its
upper lip and tries to tear all its front teeth out with her bare hands.
She fails in this, and then she goes mad from disappointment and in a
frenzy resorts to her fists.

As nearly as you are able to gather, a terrific fire has broken out in
one of the most congested tenement districts. You can hear the engines
coming and the hook-and-ladder trucks clattering over the cobbles.
Ambulances come, too, clanging their gongs, and one of them runs over a
dog; and a wall falls, burying several victims in the ruin. At this
juncture persons begin jumping out of the top-floor windows, holding
cooking stoves in their arms, and a team runs away and plunges through a
plate-glass window into a tinware and crockery store. People are all
running round and shrieking, and the dog that was run over is still
yelping--he wasn