The Hottest Day
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THE HOTTEST DAY.—
Well, we guess it was. People who were forced, for their sins, to preambulate the streets, became in about ten minutes, thoroughly used up—mere walking bundles of dripping clothes. Clean shirts were a mockery and a delusion. All the ice-water or soda-coctail that went down through the facial orifice straightway re-appeared on the surface and reduced elaborate shirt-bosoms and well-starched collars to the limpsiness of dish-rags. Canines wandered through the streets with tongues lolling half a yard out of their mouths. Old fogies suffered unimaginable tortures in black stove-pipes and sensible men sported umbrellas and eschewed alcoholic compounds. The theatres were played out. Ice-cream gardens did a heavy business. Lager-bier stock rose with unprecedented rapidity. Moral men, to whom profanity is usually a thing tabooed, gave vent to an occasional curse at the sulphuric blasts of heated ether that gave them fits, whenever the dim retreats of the back office were deserted for the streets. The cars were mere cages in which the dust whirled and disported itself, breeding opthalmea and consumption in the persons of the wretched beings inside. Eating-houses were dangerous for persons with weak stomachs to enter. Everybody kept indoors as much as possible, except bare-footed barbarous boys, and big, bare-armed Biddies. Yes, it was the hottest day of the season.