"Hush! Wait! It's certainly creeping over me."

"What's creeping over you?"

"You know what I mean. I am experiencing that strange feeling that all--
er--all _this_--has happened before."

"All what?--confound it!"

"All _this!_ My standing, on a hot summer day, in the infernal din of
some great city; and--and I seem to recall it vividly--after a fashion--
the blazing sun, the stifling odor of the pavements; I seem to remember
that very hackman over there sponging the nose of his horse--even that
pushcart piled up with peaches! Smith! What is this maddeningly elusive
memory that haunts me--haunts me with the peculiar idea that it has all
occurred before?... Do you know what I mean?"

"I've just admitted to you that everybody has that sort of fidget
occasionally, and there's no reason to stand on your hindlegs about it.
Come on or we'll miss our train."

But Beekman Brown remained stock still, his youthful and attractive
features puckered in a futile effort to seize the evanescent memories
that came swarming--gnatlike memories that teased and distracted.

"It's as if the entire circumstances were strangely familiar," he said;
"as though everything that you and I do and say had once before been done
and said by us under precisely similar conditions--somewhere--sometime."

"We'll miss that boat at the foot of Forty-second Street," cut in Smith