LABORIOUS AND MONOTONOUS.
On their skill depends one of the greatest luxuries of the table—a well baked loaf of bread—and to their credit be it said, success very frequently crowns their efforts.
The telegraph operators who work at night do not average over a dozen men. This staff is lessened or increased very much in sympathy with the quantity of dispatches which are coming in to the morning papers. When any great event is transpiring in another land or another part of this country, and long messages are coming in concerning it, the staff has to be increased, and for this purpose men are drafted from the day staff. It is an unhealthy business. In most mortality-tables, the life of the operator shows the shortest average. Not long ago they struck for higher wages and made a plucky fight, but monopoly was too much for them. Ever since they have had the screws put on them pretty tightly. Reductions in the staff and reductions in the salaries have been the order of the day. In view of these facts some of them think that it is a good thing they don’t live too long.
These are briefly the main facts connected with the toilers of the night, men who work while the rest of the world are asleep—asleep feeling assured that the telegrapher is gathering in for them the news of the world, and that the newspaper men are printing it for them, that the baker is preparing for them the breakfast roll, and that the policeman is watching over their lives and their property, and keeping his weather eye on those other people of the night, whom we are pleased to designate the Hawks.
CHAPTER II.
AN ALL-NIGHT EATING HOUSE.
The classes about whom we have been speaking take dinner at midnight, and for some of them at least, the eating house which keeps open till early morning is indeed a boon. It cannot be decried therefore even though it be a fact that the night hawks are accommodated thereby. Some of these places keep open later than others, but, as far as I know, without exception they are all situated on York street, and are a pleasant substitute for the whiskey dens which used to flourish there. A series of visits paid to these places showed that very few of the customers belonged to the class of toilers. The prowlers of all ranks and degrees though were well represented. The room is generally apportioned into little stalls curtained off from the room. It is a common saying that adversity makes strange bed-fellows, but granting that that is so, it may also be affirmed that liquor makes strange companions. In one of these eating houses one night there was observed in one compartment a doctor, a lion-tamer and a tailor, all on first-rate terms; in another was observed a commercial traveler, an Irish navvy and a tramp printer, all insisting on