to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet street in London with piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were waiting for me in my usual haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to hold, or an ear to gloze suggestions within. I tried the sea-shore; but found London-super-Mare sweltering, stewing, broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun—like Marseilles, minus the evil odours—to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of shade, that I was compelled to leave it. The paint was blistering on the bright green doors; the shingly pavement seemed to cry out “Come and grill steaks on me!” the pitch oozed from the seams of the fishing-boats; the surf hissed as it came to kiss the pebbles on the beach; the dial on the pier-head blazed with concentric rays; the chains of the suspension bridge were red hot; the camera obscura glared white in the sunshine; the turf on the Steyne was brown and parched, like a forgotten oasis in a desert; the leaves on the trees in the pavilion gardens glittered and chinked in the summer breeze, like new bright guineas; the fly-horses hung their heads, their poor tongues protruding, their limbs flaccid, and their scanty tails almost powerless to flap away the swarms of flies, which alone were riotous and active of living creation, inebriating themselves with saccharine suction in the grocers’ shops, and noisily buzzing their scanmag in private parlours; the flymen dozed on their boxes; the pushers of invalid perambulators slumbered peacefully beneath the hoods of their own Bath chairs; the ladies in the round hats found it too hot to promenade the cliff, and lolled instead at verandahed windows, arrayed in the most ravishing of muslin morning wrappers, and conversed languidly with exquisites, whose moustaches were dank with moisture, and who had scarcely energy enough to yawn. The captivating amazons abandoned for the day their plumed hats, their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather sub-fusk garments with the straps and patent-leather boots, and deferred their cavalcades on the skittish mares till the cool of the evening; the showy dragoon officers confined themselves, of their own free will, to the mess-room of their barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped sangaree, smoked fragrancias, read “Bell’s Life,” and made bets on every imaginable topic. The hair of the little Skye terriers no longer curled, but hung supine in wiry hanks; the little children made piteous appeals to their parents and guardians to be permitted to run about without anything on; the two clerks at the branch bank, who are sleepy enough in the coldest weather, nodded at each other over the ledgers which had no entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy stillness of the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks; and the very fleas in the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did they playfully leap—no longer archly gyrate; they crawled and crept,