Stop, stop, my wheel!  Too soon, too soon
The noon will be the afternoon,
  Too soon to-day be yesterday;
Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
  And trodden into clay. 
                                  —­Longfellow.

Note.—­Coptic was formerly the language of Egypt. and is preserved in the inscriptions of the ancient monuments found there; it has now given place entirely to Arabic.

LXXX.  A HOT DAY IN NEW YORK. (292)

William Dean Howells, 1837—­, was born in Belmont County.  Ohio.  In boyhood he learned the printer’s trade, at which he worked for several years.  He published a volume of poems in 1860, in connection with John J. Piatt.  From 1861 to 1865 he was United States Consul at Venice.  On his return he resided for a time in New York City, and was one of the editors of the “Nation.”  In 1871 he was appointed editor in chief of the “Atlantic Monthly.”  He held the position ten years, and then retired in order to devote himself to his own writings.  Since then, he has been connected with other literary magazines.  Mr. Howells has written several books:  novels and sketches:  his writings are marked by an artistic finish, and a keen but subtile humor.  The following selection is an extract from “Their Wedding Journey.” ###

When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway.  On this street was a throng of trucks and wagons, lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size; there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking faces of its helpless instruments.

It was four o’clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day.  The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering wings.  One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor.  Little gusts of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets.  In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life.

All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man who sat in the shade of a branching, white umbrella, and suffered with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt.