“Half an hour,” growled the Captain, “before we get our punk.”

The city clocks began to strike 12; the Bread Line moved forward slowly, its leathern feet sliding on the stones with the sound of a hissing serpent, as they who had lived according to their lights closed up in the rear.

A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM

    “The knights are dead;
     Their swords are rust. 
     Except a few who have to hust-
     Le all the time
     To raise the dust.”

Dear Reader:  It was summertime.  The sun glared down upon the city with pitiless ferocity.  It is difficult for the sun to be ferocious and exhibit compunction simultaneously.  The heat was—­oh, bother thermometers!—­who cares for standard measures, anyhow?  It was so hot that—­

The roof gardens put on so many extra waiters that you could hope to get your gin fizz now—­as soon as all the other people got theirs.  The hospitals were putting in extra cots for bystanders.  For when little, woolly dogs loll their tongues out and say “woof, woof!” at the fleas that bite ’em, and nervous old black bombazine ladies screech “Mad dog!” and policemen begin to shoot, somebody is going to get hurt.  The man from Pompton, N.J., who always wears an overcoat in July, had turned up in a Broadway hotel drinking hot Scotches and enjoying his annual ray from the calcium.  Philanthropists were petitioning the Legislature to pass a bill requiring builders to make tenement fire-escapes more commodious, so that families might die all together of the heat instead of one or two at a time.  So many men were telling you about the number of baths they took each day that you wondered how they got along after the real lessee of the apartment came back to town and thanked ’em for taking such good care of it.  The young man who called loudly for cold beef and beer in the restaurant, protesting that roast pullet and Burgundy was really too heavy for such weather, blushed when he met your eye, for you had heard him all winter calling, in modest tones, for the same ascetic viands.  Soup, pocketbooks, shirt waists, actors and baseball excuses grew thinner.  Yes, it was summertime.

A man stood at Thirty-fourth street waiting for a downtown car.  A man of forty, gray-haired, pink-faced, keen, nervous, plainly dressed, with a harassed look around the eyes.  He wiped his forehead and laughed loudly when a fat man with an outing look stopped and spoke with him.

“No, siree,” he shouted with defiance and scorn.  “None of your old mosquito-haunted swamps and skyscraper mountains without elevators for me.  When I want to get away from hot weather I know how to do it.  New York, sir, is the finest summer resort in the country.  Keep in the shade and watch your diet, and don’t get too far away from an electric fan.  Talk about your Adirondacks and your Catskills!  There’s more solid comfort in the borough of Manhattan than in all the rest of the country together.  No, siree!  No tramping up perpendicular cliffs and being waked up at 4 in the morning by a million flies, and eating canned goods straight from the city for me.  Little old New York will take a few select summer boarders; comforts and conveniences of homes—­that’s the ad. that I answer every time.”