CHAPTER XIV.
THE BURSTING OF THE STORM.
[Sidenote: An Indian summer.] There is a striking description in one of Mr.Rudyard Kipling's stories of a night in an Indian city when the dog star rages.

Luridly, but vigorously, the author brings home to you the odious discomfort, the awful suffering, and, finally, the morose anger and almost homicidal fury, which the sweltering light produces in the waking soldiers.

This would have been something like the temper of the House of Commons on June 18th, if that assembly had not recently discovered methods of saving its temper and pleasantly spending its vacant hours.

For the dog star--raging, merciless, sweltering--ruled everywhere within Westminster Palace.

On the floor of the House itself, men sweltered and mopped their foreheads; in even the recesses of the still library they groaned aloud; then down on the Terrace, and with the river sweeping by, there was not a particle of air; and the heat of all the day had made even the stony floor of that beautiful walk almost like the tiles of a red-hot oven.