He had out his tools then and there, and essayed to give some expression to his mood. The sun crackled in his brain; a pug of a child, in a scarlet linsey petticoat, came and sniffed beside him, offending his ears and his eyes; a dawdling cart mounting the hill lurched into his perspective and blotted out its details foot by foot. Down below, in his farther foreground, a cluster of buildings, lying under a church-tower in a bath of shadow, invited him as if to a plunge into cool waters. He glanced crossly at the obtrusive child, collected his traps, and strode down the hill. At its foot, however, he seemed to come upon the actual furnace-floor of noon--a broad _Place_ that bickered, as it were, throughout its length with iridescent embers. These were figured in crates of Russian cranberries glowing like braziers, in pomegranates bleeding fire, in burning globes of oranges, in apricots pearly-pink as balls of white-hot glass; and over all, the long looped awnings of olive and stone-blue and cinnamon served to the emphasising of such a galaxy of hot dyes as made a core of flame in the heart of the blazing city. The close air prickled with a multitudinous patter of voices like blisters of fat breaking on a grill. Old Burgundian houses--baked to a terra-sienna, drowzing and nodding as they took the warmth about their knees--retained and multiplied the heat like the walls of an oven. The shop windows were so many burning-glasses; the market-women fried amongst their cabbages like bubble-and-squeak; the very dogs of draught, hauling their gridirons of carts, had red-hot cinders for tongues. There seemed in the whole width of the square no shadow of which a devil could have taken solace. Exhaling some little of the breath that remained to him in an appropriately volcanic interjection, Ned mounted the steps of the church he had looked down upon, brushed past the outstretched hand of a fly-blown beggar, and dived into the sequestered obscurity of amber-scented aisles. Here the immediate fall of temperature took him by the throat like a shower-bath. “If I shiver,” he thought, “there is a goose walking over my grave.” So he stood still and hugged himself till his blood was accommodated to the change. Then he penetrated into the heart of the place.