oth of them past
fifty. The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into the spike;
but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was turned away to
tramp the streets all night.

The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty feet
wide. The sidewalks were three feet wide. It was a residence street. At
least workmen and their families existed in some sort of fashion in the
houses across from us. And each day and every day, from one in the
afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the principal feature of the
view commanded by their front doors and windows. One workman sat in his
door directly opposite us, taking his rest and a breath of air after the
toil of the day. His wife came to chat with him. The doorway was too
small for two, so she stood up. Their babes sprawled before them. And
here was the spike line, less than a score of feet away--neither privacy
for the workman, nor privacy for the pauper. About our feet played the
children of the neighbourhood. To them our presence was nothing unusual.
We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and ordinary as the brick
walls and stone curbs of their environment. They had been born to the
sight of the spike line, and all their brief days they had seen it.

At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution,
and the previous night's "doss," were taken with lightning-like rapidity
by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man's
thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting
into my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?" "No, sir," I lied, as
lied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the cellar, I
looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to the
language it might be called "bread." By its weight and hardness it
certainly must have been unleavened.

The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand. Then I stumbled on
to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men. The place
smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices from out
of the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the infernal
regions.

Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced the
meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with which
their feet were