Nowhere in all the widespread expanse of London was that day's heat felt so much as in the city, where the streets are for the most part narrow and high, and where men are crowded together like sheep in a pen. It would have been hard to find a cool-looking man amidst the seething crowds around the Bank or in Leadenhall Street, or in Fenchurch Street, or in any of the thoroughfares where everybody bustles and hustles as if for dear life. True, there are plenty of delightfully shady nooks, cool enough in any weather, however tropical, in the old world squares and alleys of the city and behind the walls of its old churches, but who has time to stay in them when every one must get from some certain point to another in the shortest possible time? And so that strange hive of human bees sweltered, enduring in patience or cursing in impatience, while the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the pavements seemed as hard as adamant and as hot as a furnace.
Richard Goulburn, seated at his desk in his office at Messrs. Pepperall & Tardrew's, Tea Merchants, Mincing Lane, congratulated himself that it was well out of the sunlight. He remembered the vivid glare of the sun on the previous day, but that had been tempered by a stirring breeze; to-day, as he knew, having been out in the streets for half an hour at noon, there was no breeze, and the heat was great. The room in which he sat was at the back of the building, and looked into a court the walls of which were covered with white tiles, cool to look at and rarely get-at-able by the
