Can you not draw yourself the picture of the boy starting on his way—whither?
I stood for some time in the doorway. A policeman loomed in the distance. Boys cannot bear them in day time, how much less at night. To be "collared" by a "cop" at this hour meant a stay in the station house and a visit to the police court. I put myself in motion.
With cap pulled over my ears and hands pushed into my pockets, I started in the direction of the Bowery and Chatham Street, now called Park Row. I halted under a lamp-post to determine on my course.
"Uptown" was an entirely unknown region to me. "Downtown" was not much more familiar, but, somehow, I knew that that was the place where all the newsboys came from.
I turned to the left and walked and ran—the night was bitterly cold—down Chatham street until I came within view of the City Hall. So far I had been once or twice before on some adventurous trip, but not beyond that. Though I did not realize it at the time, I stood on my jumping-off place, ready to jump into the unknown.
I paused for a while, looking into the darkness before me. In those days, before the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, City Hall Square was not as brilliantly lighted as now. I stood there until the biting cold made me move on.
My eyes were watery from the meeting blasts, and, stumbling on, I almost fell on top of a layer of diminutive humanity. Before I had time to draw my stiffened hands from the pockets to wipe my eyes, I felt a welcome sensation of warmth, thick, intense, damp, ink-permeated warmth.
The warm current came from the grating over the pressroom of a newspaper. This open-air radiator only measured a few feet, yet, at least, fifteen boys were hugging it as closely as their mothers' breasts. The iron frame was entirely invisible, and my share of warmth coming from it was very trifling. But, even so, only a few minutes of this straggling cheer was afforded to me.
Just as some of the numbness began to thaw out of my limbs, the cry—ever and ever familiar to the newsboy—"Cheese it, the cop!" rang out, and, like a horde of frightened sprites, the boys scampered away, I bringing up the rear.
We raced around the corner into Frankfort street and stopped in a dark hallway, which seemed to be the headquarters of this particular crowd. It was not warm in there, but, at any rate, it was a shelter against the cutting gusts of night winds, playing their stormy games of "hide-and-seek" around the blocks facing Park Row.