“Delightful!” answered Basil, who was always charmed with these small originalities.  “You look well enough for an evening party; and besides, you won’t meet one of your own critical class on Broadway at this hour.  We will breakfast at one of those gilded metropolitan restaurants, and then go round to Leonard’s, who will be able to give us just three unhurried seconds.  After that we’ll push on out to his place.”

At that early hour there were not many people astir on the wide avenue down which our friends strolled when they left the station; but in the aspect of those they saw there was something that told of a greater heat than they had yet known in Boston, and they were sensible of having reached a more southern latitude.  The air, though freshened by the over-night’s storm, still wanted the briskness and sparkle and pungency of the Boston air, which is as delicious in summer as it is terrible in winter; and the faces that showed themselves were sodden from the yesterday’s heat and perspiration.  A corner-grocer, seated in a sort of fierce despondency upon a keg near his shop door, had lightly equipped himself for the struggle of the day in the battered armor of the day before, and in a pair of roomy pantaloons, and a baggy shirt of neutral tint—­perhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst the siege of the hot weather lasted,—­now confronted the advancing sunlight, before which the long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring.  A marketing mother of a family paused at a provision-store, and looking weakly in at the white-aproned butcher among his meats and flies, passes without an effort to purchase.  Hurried and wearied shop-girls tripped by in the draperies that betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby; from a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those cool young New Yorkers whom no circumstances can oppress:  breezy-coated, white-livened, clean, with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the elbow of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning’s news is snatched, whilst the person sways lightly with the walk; in the street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were rows of people with baskets between their legs and papers before their faces; and all showed by some peculiarity of air or dress the excess of heat which they had already borne, and to which they seemed to look forward, and gave by the scantiness of their number a vivid impression of the uncounted thousands within doors prolonging, before the day’s terror began, the oblivion of sleep.

As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet deeper seclusion, Basil-began to utter in a musing tone: 

        “A city against the world’s gray Prime,
        Lost in some desert, far from Time,
        Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
        Have only sifted sands and dew,
        Yet still a marble head of man
        Lying