e organized sympathy of the seemingly
indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his patient, who thereupon
tasted something in the glass he held. "Do you still feel like
fainting?" asked the humane authority. "Slightly, now and then,"
answered the other, "but I'm hanging on hard to the bottom curve of that
icicled S on your soda-fountain, and I feel that I'm all right as long
as I can see that. The people get rather hazy, occasionally, and have
no features to speak of. But I don't know that I look very impressive
myself," he added in the jesting mood which seems the natural condition
of Americans in the face of all embarrassments.

"O, you'll do!" the apothecary answered, with a laugh; but he said, in
answer to an anxious question from the lady, "He mustn't be moved for an
hour yet," and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed
her office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her
husband's skull. Isabel offered her the commiseration of friendly words,
and of looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they could do nothing, she
and Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side
door. "What a shocking thing!" she whispered. "Did you see how all the
people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and
evidently forgot them the next instant? It was dreadful. I shouldn't
like to have you sun-struck in New York."

"That's very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident
must happen to me among strangers, I think I should prefer to have it
in New York. The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the
cruelest place. Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan
as well as the Levite would be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, it
requires peculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter,
then I say, give me the busiest part of Broadway for a sun-stroke. There
is such experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall
the first victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the
apothecary's was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for
revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands every
blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd may be a little
'ennuye' of sun-strokes, and to that degree indifferent, but they most
likely know that they can only do harm by an expression of sympathy, and
so they delegate their pity as they have delegated their helpfulness to
the proper authority, and go