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. In
short, it was a day when one felt one's own poor tenement of clay a
misery, a nuisance, and a burden; and the mind, morose, black, and
despondent, had distracting visions of distant mirages by the seashore
or under green trees. It was natural, under such circumstances, that
everybody who could should desert the House of Commons.
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