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.  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