“Do you still feel like fainting?” asked the humane authority.  “Slightly, now and then,” answered the other, “but I’m hanging on hard to the bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda fountain, and I feel that I’m all right as long as I can see that.  The people get rather hazy occasionally, and have no features to speak of.  But I do n’t know that I look very impressive myself,” he added in the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Americans in the face of an embarrassments.

“Oh, you’ll do!” the apothecary answered, with a laugh; but he said, in an answer to an anxious question from the lady, “He mustn’t be moved for an hour yet,” and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband’s skull.  Isabel offered her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet, and then, seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door.

“What a shocking thing,” she whispered.  “Did you see how all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant?  It was dreadful.  I should n’t like to have you sun-struck in New York.”

“That’s very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should prefer to have it in New York.  The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest place.  Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be sure to be.  As for a sunstroke, it requires peculiar gifts.  But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say give me the busiest part of Broadway for a sunstroke.  There is such experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first victim to any misfortune.”

LXXXI.  DISCONTENT.—­AN ALLEGORY. (295)

Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, the brilliant essayist and poet, has long occupied an exalted place in English literature.  He was the son of an English clergyman, was born in Wiltshire, and educated at Oxford; he died at “Holland House” (the property of his wile, to whom he had been married but about two years), and was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Several years of his life were spent in the political affairs of his time, he held several public offices, and was, for ten years, a member of Parliament.  His fame as an author rests chiefly upon his “Hymns,” his tragedy of “Cato,” and his “Essays” contributed principally to the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.”  The excellent style of his essays, their genial wit and sprightly humor, made them conspicuous in an age when coarseness, bitterness, and exaggeration deformed the writings of the most eminent:  and these characteristics have given them an unquestioned place among the classics of our language.

Mr. Addison was shy and diffident, but genial and lovable; his moral character was above reproach, excepting that he is said to have been too fond of wine. ###