The months dragged by in their dreary, hated length,
while numerous chances of getting more congenial work
were tried in vain. Torrid summer heat, with its all-dissolving
humidity, replaced the bitter winter. The deep,
baked streets that never cooled, the stifling nights, the
heat-waves when the temperature stood between 90 and
100 in the shade, and we toiled about the blazing pavements
in shirt-sleeves carrying a palm-leaf fan, and when
the moisture in the air made the very "copy-paper"
stick to the hand that wrote upon it--those four months
of New York summer were a misery. We had only our
winter clothes to wear; a white collar was dirty pulp before
nine in the morning; the dazzling electric-light sign
flashed nightly in the air above 23rd Street with its
tempting legend "Manhattan Beach Swept by Ocean
Breezes," while the ice-carts in the streets were the nearest
approach to comfort we could find. Many a time I
followed one at close quarters to taste a whiff of cooler
air. Life became unendurable, yet day followed day, night
followed night, week followed week, till one's last breath
of energy seemed exhausted by the steaming furnace
of the city air.
The respectable quarters of the town were, of course, deserted, but the East Side, and the poorer parts, became a gigantic ant-heap, thousands of families sleeping on the balconies of the packed tenement houses, as though a whole underground-world had risen suddenly to the surface. Children died by the hundred; there were heat strokes by the score. It was too hot to eat. Reporting in such weather was a trying business.... A reporter was entitled to a fortnight's holiday in the year, and though none was due to me, McCloy let me go about the middle of October. I procured a railway pass and went off to Haliburton, Ontario, to spend my precious twelve days with a settler in the backwoods. He was a Scotsman I had met during our island days, and Haliburton was not far from our own delightful lake.... On my way back the cable came telling of my father's death while
being brought home from Ems. I was spending the night
