So the hot day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down
like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking the
hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the
bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off
the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses. He
looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where
you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by
day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing through the
restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this
common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I might read, if our
eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be. A commonplace crowd
like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces,
heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters,
negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which
the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races
was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds, philosophies, centuries old,
grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,--where innumerable aims
and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant
wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.
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