During the earlier hours of the evening there are kaleidoscopic changes of scene. Sensations of all kinds draw the crowd hither and thither. An arrest, an alarm of fire, with the rush of the engines and hook and ladder wagons tearing like mad through the streets, a march out of the volunteers with the inspiriting martial music of the band—any of these distractions sift out the younger and more excitable element, who follow at the top of their speed, leaving the streets half deserted. There is nothing delights the rougher element more than to see an unfortunate who has been imbibing too freely “run in.” A blue coat in charge of anybody in fact always draws, particularly if the delinquent is noisy and obstreperous. And a fire is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. At the first alarm the saunterers are all animation. “Where is it?” is the question on everyone’s tongue, and as soon as the locality is defined, away they go—fortunate if they arrive before the firemen cease playing, for under the fire alarm system a conflagration has very little opportunity of making headway.
Of late the Salvation Army is a frequent element in diversifying the life of the streets after nightfall. Its parades invariably attract a crowd of strollers, many of them of a class whom the ministrations of the regular religious bodies do not reach. Their banners and uniform, their marching music, and the stentorian voices of their street preachers have by this time become a recognized and familiar feature of city life, and though the novelty of their advent has worn off the people manifest as much interest as ever in their sayings and doings. Their parade in the middle of the street is accompanied by simultaneous parallel processions of a less orderly character on the sidewalks. Whatever may be thought of the ultimate effect of this manner of presenting religion to the mass, there is no question that it arrests their attention.
As the night advances, the crowd thins out.
THE STREET-LOUNGERS,
male and female, disappear one by one, the stores have closed their doors, until the only places which show signs of business activity are here and there a saloon or a tobacco store, which may or may not have a keg of lager on tap in the back-room or a “little game” upstairs. Now the streets again assume for a few minutes a lively aspect as the places of amusement are emptied of their audiences. Overladen street cars make their final trips, toiling wearily up the ascent with frequent stoppages as the suburbs are neared. And now the streets are almost deserted again. Stray pedestrians hurry or totter homeward. The saloon lights are extinguished, but acute ears can still hear the clink of glasses and the subdued conversation of groups of revellers who are bound to make a night of it, and are cheerfully fuddling themselves in a back room. The wearied bar-keeper will let them out by a side door in an hour or two. He will breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief as they stumble over the threshold, and slipping the bolt with alacrity, to prevent any other belated seeker after the ardent gaining entrance, he will knock down about half of the cash the party have left, and congratulate himself on his honesty in leaving so much for his employer.
One o’clock. The city sleeps. The few stragglers on the streets only serve to make the general impression of silence and solitude the more vivid by contrast. Here and there is a pedestrian on his homeward way, or perhaps a party of two or three late roysterers laughing and bursting into snatches of song, but growing suddenly silent and bracing up as the measured tread of the blue-coated guardian of the night approaches. Now and then a stray hack rumbles by, the noise of the wheels gradually dying away in the distance and leaving no other sound audible. The night watchman passes, carefully trying the doors of the stores and halting for a friendly chat with the policeman on the corner of the block. The puffing of the locomotive or steamboat engine a mile or two away, inaudible during the day-time, sounds strangely near. Up and down the long stretches of sidewalk hardly anyone is in sight. It is like a city of the dead. The cold steely-blue brilliancy of the electric light makes the darkness around their radiant circle seem denser and throws the dark shadows of intervening objects across the street. The long rows of gas-lamps on the side streets “pale their ineffectual fires” and present but a sickly glimmer by contrast, and overhead shine the eternal stars, whose distant scintillations amid the silence and darkness of midnight have ever had power to speak from the soul of things to the soul of man, and suggest the ever-old yet ever-new problems of life and destiny unheard and unheeded amid the distractions of the day.
CHAPTER I.
THE TOILERS OF THE NIGHT.
When the streets leading from the center of the city are full of people hurrying gleefully or otherwise homewards from their day’s toil, there is another small section of the community who are hurrying in the opposite direction. These men begin to work when all others have ceased. The morning newspaper employes, the telegraph operators, the bakers, the policemen, and the nightwatchmen are the most important divisions of these toilers of the night.
In connection with the different newspaper establishments in the city there are probably about 600 persons employed at night. These include compositors, pressmen, stereotypers, mailing clerks, editors, reporters, and route boys. All do not work during the same hours, but some portions of their various tasks are accomplished when “Night draws her sable mantle around and pins it with a star.” The compositors begin “setting” about 7 o’clock and cease about 3. This does not comprise the whole of their work, however, as the next day they spend two or three hours filling up the cases which they did their best to empty the night before. It is an exceedingly see-saw business—undoing in the day what they performed in the night. The work is entirely by the piece, and a fast hand makes a good wage to reward him for his toil, but this wage represents twelve or thirteen hours of labor in the large establishments. Many of the men think that it would be better to