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.
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