"What a fool I am!" thought Abel, bitterly. He was steadily asking
himself, "Have--I--lost--Hope Wayne--before--I--had--won--her?"

CHAPTER XIX.

DOG-DAYS.

The great city roared, and steamed, and smoked. Along the hot,
glaring streets by the river a few panting people hurried, clinging
to the house wall for a thin strip of shade, too narrow even to cover
their feet. All the windows of the stores were open, and within the
offices, with a little thinking, a little turn of the pen, and a little
tracing in ink, men were magically warding off impending disaster, or
adding thousands to the thousands accumulated already--men, too, were
writing without thinking, mechanically copying or posting, scribbling
letters of form, with heads clear or heads aching, with hearts
burning or cold; full of ambition and hope, or vaguely remembering
country hill-sides and summer rambles--a day's fishing--a night's
frolic--Sunday-school--singing-school, and the girl with the chip
hat garlanded with sweet-brier; hearts longing and loving, regretting,
hoping, and remembering, and all the while the faces above them calm
and smooth, and the hands below them busily doing their part of the
great work of the world.

In Wall Street there was restless running about. Men in white clothes
and straw-hats darted in at doors, darted out of doors--carrying little
books, and boxes, and bundles in their hands, nodding to each other
as they passed, but all infected with the same fever; with brows
half-wrinkled or tied up in hopeless seams of perplexity; with muttering
pale lips, or lips round and red, and clearly the lips of clerks who had
no great stakes at issue--a general rushing and hurrying as if every
body were haunted by the fear of arriving too late every where, and
losing all possible chances in every direction.

Within doors there were cool bank parlors and insurance offices, with
long rows of comely clerks writing in those Russia red books which Thomas
Tray loved--or wetting their fingers on little sponges in little glass
dishes and counting whole fortunes in bank-notes--or perched high on
office-stools eating apples--while Presidents and Directors, with shiny
bald pates and bewigged heads, some heroically with permanent spectacles
and others coyly and weakly with eye-glasses held in the hand, sat
perusing the papers, telling the news, and gossiping about engagements,
and marriages, and family rumors, and secrets with the air of practi