aited patiently, like cattle, in the coldest
weather--waited for several hours before they could be admitted. No
questions were asked and no service rendered. They ate and went away
again, some of them returning regularly day after day the winter
through.

A big, motherly looking woman invariably stood guard at the door during
the entire operation and counted the admissible number. The men moved up
in solemn order. There was no haste and no eagerness displayed. It was
almost a dumb procession. In the bitterest weather this line was to be
found here. Under an icy wind there was a prodigious slapping of hands
and a dancing of feet. Fingers and the features of the face looked as if
severely nipped by the cold. A study of these men in broad light proved
them to be nearly all of a type. They belonged to the class that sit on
the park benches during the endurable days and sleep upon them during
the summer nights. They frequent the Bowery and those down-at-the-heels
East Side streets where poor clothes and shrunken features are not
singled out as curious. They are the men who are in the lodginghouse
sitting-rooms during bleak and bitter weather and who swarm about the
cheaper shelters which only open at six in a number of the lower East
Side streets. Miserable food, ill-timed and greedily eaten, had played
havoc with bone and muscle. They were all pale, flabby, sunken-eyed,
hollow-chested, with eyes that glinted and shone and lips that were a
sickly red by contrast. Their hair was but half attended to, their ears
anaemic in hue, and their shoes broken in leather and run down at heel
and toe. They were of the class which simply floats and drifts, every
wave of people washing up one, as breakers do driftwood upon a stormy
shore.

For nearly a quarter of a century, in another section of the city,
Fleischmann, the baker, had given a loaf of bread to any one who would
come for it to the side door of his restaurant at the corner of Broadway
and Tenth Street, at midnight. Every night during twenty years about
three hundred men had formed in line and at the appointed time marched
past the doorway, picked their loaf from a great box placed just
outside, and vanished again into the night. From the beginning to the
present time there had been little change in the character or number of
these men. There were two or three figures that had grown familiar to
those who had seen this little procession pass year after year. Two
of them had mi