lots cast no shadow. With great
bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these spaces
as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses of desert sand;
they crept slowly along till they came to such a place, and dashed
swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before, moved on. They seemed
now and then to stand at doors, and to be told that people were out and
again that they were in; and they had a sense of cool dark parlors,
and the airy rustling of light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and
ice-water, and then they came forth again; and evermore

"The day increased from heat to heat."

At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a purpose to
go down town again, and of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks
of brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brownstone flights of
steps, and their handsome, intolerable uniformity, oppressed them like a
procession of houses trying to pass a given point and never getting by.
Upon these streets there was, seldom a soul to be seen, so that when
their ringing at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with a
vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars
and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next
intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across
his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad. Up
to the time of their getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the
return down-townwards they had kept up a show of talk in their wretched
dream; they had spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere;
and they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been so
little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder might even
at that moment be somewhere taking place; and that no murder of the
whole homicidal year could have such proper circumstance; they
morbidly wondered what that day's murder would be, and in what swarming
tenement-house, or den of the assassin streets by the river-sides,--if
indeed it did not befall in some such high, close-shuttered, handsome
dwelling as those they passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to
strike down the master and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by
the family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They
conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguish
of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy misery of
stevedores