The lodging-house we are visiting this Sunday morning is so huge, and its accommodation is so vast, that it is patronized by the poor of every class. The poor working man is there, and the poor clerk; the wreckage of the superior class is there also, but there are no professional tramps. The professional tramp would find the society slow, and there would be no one with whom he could compare notes and yarn about the bad times that had come to the road. He prefers the more genial and instructive society of the street beggar, the itinerant musicians, and the "dodgers."
You will rarely see any work being done in a tramps' lodging-house.
The nearest approach to it is when one or two of the company patch their rags or take a needle and thread and collect their rents—those in their garments.
But in the lodging-house we are visiting you will find a number of the occupants hard at work, even on Sunday morning.
Beyond the common kitchen is a room with a long, wide table. Every seat at this table is occupied by men who are writing as diligently as if they were in an office.
Most of the men are of the broken-down clerk class. Many are young; only one or two are middle-aged. But all are lean and dilapidated and hungry-looking.
These poor fellows are addressing envelopes at so much a thousand, or filling in circulars, or doing copying work. On the table is a Post Office Directory for the use of the envelope-directors, and there is a good supply of inkstands.
Some of the men have been at work since nine, and, with a short interval, will work away till late in the afternoon, perhaps till the evening. They are earning the price of the next night's bed.
These men belong to the shabby-genteel brigade of the common lodging-house. Many of them have still the traces of refinement on their features, though their clothes are threadbare and their bowler hats weather-beaten and greasy-brimmed.
Who are they? What stroke of evil fortune brought them to this last ditch in the fight with Fate?