ties
of the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers
at which some of them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful
languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying
bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from
one arm to another; after every station the desperate conductor swung
through the long aisle and punched the ticket, which each passenger
seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction; a suffering child hung
about the empty tank, which could only gasp out a cindery drop or two of
ice-water. The wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was
opened, the clatter of the rails struck through and through the car like
a demoniac yell.

Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they seemed to
have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere,
so close and dead and mined with the carbonic breath of the locomotives
was the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the
glare of the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; the roof seemed
to hover lower and lower, and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to
generate a heat deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.

In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer, before which
every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine,
and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends
also paused, and saw that the mercury was above ninety, and exulting
with the pride that savages take in the cruel might of their idols,
bowed their souls to the great god Heat.

On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool
across their faces, and made them forget the thermometer for the
brief time of the transit. But presently they drew near that strange,
irregular row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the
river on the New York aide, and before the boat's motion ceased the air
grew thick and warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street
on which the buildings front. Upon this the boat's passengers issued,
passing up through a gangway, on one side of which a throng of
return-passengers was pent by a gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild
animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and, according to their
different temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor.

"Now the question is, my dear," said Basil when, free of the press, they
lingered for a m