We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.  Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross.  That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied.  The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless.  Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers.  On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself.  Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.

The purchaser of the morphia wanders into the fog, and at length, finds himself upon a little iron bridge, one of the score or more in the heart of the city, under which the small tortuous river flows.  He leans on the rail and gasps, for here the mist has concentrated, lying like a foot-pad to garrote such of the Three Thousand as creep that way.  The iron bridge guys rattle to the strain of his cough, a mocking phthisical rattle, seeming to say to him:  “Clickety-clack! just a little rusty cold, sir—­but not from our river.  Litmus paper all along the banks and nothing but ozone.  Clacket-y-clack!”

The Memphis man at last recovers sufficiently to be aware of another overcoated man ten feet away, leaning on the rail, and just coming out of a paroxysm.  There is a freemasonry among the Three Thousand that does away with formalities and introductions.  A cough is your card; a hemorrhage a letter of credit.  The Memphis man, being nearer recovered, speaks first.

“Goodall.  Memphis—­pulmonary tuberculosis—­guess last stages.”  The Three Thousand economize on words.  Words are breath and they need breath to write checks for the doctors.

“Hurd,” gasps the other.  “Hurd; of T’leder.  T’leder, Ah-hia.  Catarrhal bronkeetis.  Name’s Dennis, too—­doctor says.  Says I’ll live four weeks if I—­take care of myself.  Got your walking papers yet?”

“My doctor,” says Goodall of Memphis, a little boastingly, “gives me three months.”

“Oh,” remarks the man from Toledo, filling up great gaps in his conversation with wheezes, “damn the difference.  What’s months!  Expect to—­cut mine down to one week—­and die in a hack—­a four wheeler, not a cough.  Be considerable moanin’ of the bars when I put out to sea.  I’ve patronized ’em pretty freely since I struck my—­present gait.  Say, Goodall of Memphis—­if your doctor has set your pegs so close—­why don’t you—­get on a big spree and go—­to the devil quick and easy—­like I’m doing?”

“A spree,” says Goodall, as one who entertains a new idea, “I never did such a thing.  I was thinking of another way, but—­”