-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 sele