Most of the foot passengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though there were fewer women among them.  Indomitably resolute of soul, they held their course with the 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 the organized sympathy of the seemingly indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted something in the glass he held.