<= 
1826.) [ ll ] 
MBI 11002 91 ms A DOG-DAY. 
%o bit 1 
po Now. the dog-star reigns, and the weather is really what Butler de- 
scribes, it—* insulting hot.” Now old ladies, who dare venture a-shop- 
ping, go parasolling their withered perfections along, and entertain a 
decided dread of injuring the immaterial whiteness of their skins, which 
haye ceased to be compared to “ lilies” and ‘ snows,” and other son- 
net-like similes, for more than thirty summers; and now old gentlemen 
look very earnestly at their thermometers, and find that they are within 
afew degrees of self-combustion, or at least of slow suffocation. Now 
dogs go mad, and dowdies go to Margate ; and steam-boats are full, and 
cing on deck is thought vulgar, and cigars quite unnecessary. Now 
people who must stay in town crawl along, a caterpillar’s pace, in the 
shade of dead walls, and look half as dead themselves. Now butchers, 
as they pass to noseward, remind youof Dicky Suett—they emit such a 
suety smell; and now butchers’ boys are particularly inveterate against 
blue-bottles, and have not common patience with common flies; and 
butchers’ dogs dream of gnats, and become excessively snappish. Now 
cooks suffer a daily martyrdom ; and scullion-boys have a bitter time of 
it, and wish they had been born black in the Western Ind, instead of 
being beaten so by the cudgelling cooks of the western end, who are now 
more than ever impatient, hot, angry, and savage. Now Aldermen puff 
and blow like grampusses left ashore, and go about the City, at every 
hundred yards dabbing their foreheads with their white handkerchiefs, 
which are in half an hour wet to the initial corners. Now pump-handles 
are going all day long, like Captain Sabine’s pendulums vibrating seconds; 
and Aldgate-pump seems as if it had not yet recovered from the late 
panic in the City—there is such a continual run upon it; and now dry 
dogs stand under pumps barking at the handles, in utter helplessness of 
themselves, and look with watering eye at the cooling fluid as it pours 
into pitchers and cans, and think unutterable things of the iron ladle and 
the idle boys, neither of whom offer them a.drop. Now firemen, who are 
also watermen, throw off as insufferable their Sun Fire-office jackets, and 
cannot endure to recollect that there ever was such a thing as a house 
on fire; and if you tell them where there is one in the next street, they 
break out into a preparatory perspiration; and now amateurs, who row 
up to Richmond in funnies, find their amusement rather serious and 
sedentary, and think the towing-horses on the Putney shore have a 
much easier time of it, for they work in the shade ; and now those more 
adventurous, who get as far as Twickenham Ayte, make up their minds 
to hate Twickenham all the rest of their lives. Now pedestrians, who 
have a taste for rural delights, and have five miles to walk, die through 
two, and d—n every step of the other three ; and now the good-looking, 
red-faced and white-hatted gentlemen who drive the short stages are 
suspected to meet with many more half-way houses than ordinary ; their 
wit, too, is more than usually dry. Now table-beer casks become very 
soon on the tilt, to the alarm of stewards and the astonishment of but- 
’ lers, who wonder how they could possibly have run out so fast. The 
coachman and groom are asked if they can account for it: coachee, who 
comes from the west countree, declares it to be out of his guess; but 
Ned the groom, who comes from Yorkshire, doubts whether it be not 
possible for twenty gallons of table-ale to drink up each other in such dry 
weather! Now publicans use twice their usual quantity of chalk; and 
_  M.M. New Series.—Vot. II. No. 8. ¥ 
