The Patagonia

The houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert.

The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls.

As every one was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables.

The heat was insufferable and I thought with joy of the morrow, of the deck of the steamer, the freshening breeze, the sense of getting out to sea.

I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company - that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage.

America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air