CHAPTER XIX.
DOG-DAYS.
The great city roared, and steamed, and smoked.

Along the hot, glaring streets by the river a few panting people hurried, clinging to the house wall for a thin strip of shade, too narrow even to cover their feet.

All the windows of the stores were open, and within the offices, with a little thinking, a little turn of the pen, and a little tracing in ink, men were magically warding off impending disaster, or adding thousands to the thousands accumulated already--men, too, were writing without thinking, mechanically copying or posting, scribbling letters of form, with heads clear or heads aching, with hearts burning or cold; full of ambition and hope, or vaguely remembering country hill-sides and summer rambles--a day's fishing--a night's frolic--Sunday-school--singing-school, and the girl with the chip hat garlanded with sweet-brier; hearts longing and loving, regretting, hoping, and remembering, and all the while the faces above them calm and smooth, and the hands below them busily doing their part of the great work of the world.
In Wall Street there was restless running about.

Men in white clothes and straw-hats darted in at doors, darted out of doors--carrying little books, and boxes, and bundles in their hands, nodding to each other as they passed, but all infected with the same fever; with brows half-wrinkled or tied up in hopeless seams of perplexity; with muttering pale lips, or lips round and red, and clearly the lips of clerks who had no great stakes at issue--a general rushing and hurrying as if every body were haunted by the fear of arriving too late every where, and losing all possible chances in every direction.
Within doors there were cool bank parlors and insurance offices, with long rows of comely clerks writing in those Russia red books which Thomas Tray loved--or wetting their fingers on little sponges in little glass dishes and counting whole fortunes in bank-notes--or perched high on office-stools eating apples--while Presidents and Directors, with shiny bald pates and bewigged heads, some heroically with permanent spectacles and others coyly and weakly with eye-glasses held in the hand, sat perusing the papers, telling the news, and gossiping about engagements, and marriages, and family rumors, and secrets with the air of practical men of the world, with no nonsense, no fanaticism, no fol-de-rol of any kind about them, but who profoundly believed the Burt theory that wives and daughters were a more sacred kind of property than sheep pastures, or even than the most satisfactory bond and mortgage.
They talked politics, these banking and insurance gentlemen, with vigor and warmth.

"What on earth does, this General Jackson mean, Sir?
Is he going to lay the axe at the very roots of our national prosperity?
What the deuce does a frontier soldier know about banking ?" They talked about Morgan who had been found in Lake Ontario; and the younger clerks took their turn at it, and furiously denied among themselves that Washington was a Mason.