The side streets leading to the great markets are blocked with a great traffic of laden vans. The news of the world is being prepared in great printing offices for the million eyes as yet closed in sleep. Through the quiet wards of the great hospitals the sisters of suffering move gently from bed to bed, tending the maimed and sick.
The refreshment houses of the night-workers are open, and between four and five o'clock many of them are packed with breakfasting guests. Down by the dock gates a great crowd of men has gathered long before the grey dawn throws their anxious and often careworn faces into relief. These men have waited, many of them, through the dead of night to be nearest to the great gates when they open, and the foremen come to choose the hands that are needed for the unloading of the ships.
And there among the crowd waiting, some of them in the last despair for a day's work, you may find many a mystery. All the men who wait in dumb patience through the long hours for the dock gates to open are not of the labouring class. The wreckage drifts to the dock gates for a job, because it is the great market for unskilled labour.
I have seen in the crowd army men, 'varsity men, City men, actors, stockbrokers, and once a clergyman. To the dock gates there came a year or two back, day after day, a baronet. He was ill-clad, hungry, and broken-hearted. He got a job at last, only to be sent away before he had done a couple of hours' work, because he was too weak for the task he had undertaken in his last desperate strait.
But as the dead of night yields to the dawn, there are brighter scenes to look upon than the listless, anxious-eyed crowd at the dock gates and the wharves of the great river of wealth.
Soon after four, in many a little side street, the professional caller goes his round to rouse the sleepers who must be early astir, and by five there is a plentiful sprinkling of healthy-looking, clean-faced, stalwart men tramping along steadily, pipe in mouth and cloth-wrapped dinner in hand, wending their way to the labour of the day.
The trains have begun to discharge their human freight. Over the bridges pours a steady stream of humanity, the steam whistles sound shrilly on the morning air, the warning bells of the factories clang noisily. The rest of the night is over, the work of the day has begun, the evil-doer has slunk away into the darkness, and the honest breadwinners go cheerfully to their work, looking the whole world in the face.