Page:The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.djvu/64

60 "What a stout person 'e are," said Mrs. Sampson to herself, as the detective walked away, "just like my late father, who was always fleshy, bein' a great eater, and fond of 'is glass, but I took arter my mother's family, they bein' thin-like, and proud of keeping 'emselves so, as the vinegar they drank could testify, not that I indulge in it myself."

She shut the door, and went upstairs to take away the breakfast things, while Gorby was being driven along at a good pace to the police office, in order to get a warrant for Brian's arrest, on a charge of willful murder.





It was a broiling hot day—one of those cloudless days, with the blazing sun beating down on the arid streets, and casting deep, black shadows. By rights it was a December day, but the clerk of the weather had evidently got a little mixed, and popped it into the middle of August by mistake. The previous week however had been a little chilly, and this delightfully hot day had come as a pleasant surprise and a forecast of summer. It was Saturday morning, and of course all fashionable Melbourne was doing the Block. With regard to its "Block," Collins Street corresponds to New York's Broadway, London's Regent Street and Rotten Row, and to the Boulevards of Paris. It is on the Block that people show off their new dresses, bow to their friends, cut their enemies, and chatter small talk. The same thing no doubt occurred in the Appian Way, the fashionable Street of Imperial Rome, when Catallus talked gay nonsense to Lesbia, and Horace received the congratulations of his friends over his new volume of society verses. History repeats itself, and every city is bound by all the laws of civilization to have one special street wherein the votaries of fashion may congregate. Collins Street is not, of course, such a grand thoroughfare as those above mentioned, but the people who stroll up and down the broad pavement are quite as charmingly dressed, and as pleasant as any of the paripateticsperipatetics [sic] of 