swift pace of custom, and only here and there they showed the effect
of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set
far back from his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby
face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a
somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the
friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My hands tingle as
if they had gone to sleep; my heart--" But still the multitude hurried
on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors
and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming
out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular
fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have
seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who
were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason
for this,--looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being
accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of purpose,
they cried with one voice, that it was a hideous sight, and strove
to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the soda-fountain
sparkled.

It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary's hung a
thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with
a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, "Ninety-seven
degrees!" Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream
of people, each pausing at the shrine of heat; before he tossed off
the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from
either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their coming
they issued through another door upon the side street, each, as he
disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance
upon a little group near another counter. The group was of a very
patient, half-frightened, half-puzzled looking gentleman who sat
perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing
all over his head a handkerchief full of pounded ice, and easing one
hand with the other when the first became tired. Basil drank his soda
and paused to look upon this group, which he felt would commend itself
to realistic sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life,
and as "The Sunstroke" would sell enormously in the hot season. "Better
take a little more of that," the apothecary said, looking up from
his prescription, and, as th