could muster he addressed himself to walk.

It was then the height of the season and the summer; the weather

was serene and cloudless; and as he paced under the blinded houses

and along the vacant streets, the chill of the dawn had fled, and

some of the warmth and all the brightness of the July day already

shone upon the city. He walked at first in a profound abstraction,

bitterly reviewing and repenting his performances at whist; but as

he advanced into the labyrinth of the south-west, his ear was

gradually mastered by the silence. Street after street looked down

upon his solitary figure, house after house echoed upon his passage

with a ghostly jar, shop after shop displayed its shuttered front

and its commercial legend; and meanwhile he steered his course,

under day's effulgent dome and through this encampment of diurnal

sleepers, lonely as a ship.

'Here,' he reflected, 'if I were like my scatter-brained companion,

here were indeed the scene where I might look for an adventure.

Here, in broad day, the streets are secret as in the blackest night

of January, and in the midst of some four million sleepers,

solitary as the woods of Yucatan. If I but raise my voice I could

summon up the number of an army, and yet the grave is not more

silent than this city of sleep.'

He was still following these quaint and serious musings when he

came into a street of more mingled ingredients than was common in

the quarter. Here, on the one hand, framed in walls and the green

tops of trees, were several of those discreet, bijou residences on

which propriety is apt to look askance. Here, too, were many of

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