The basement was brightly lighted with gas everywhere, and a savoury odour of onion-flavoured broth diffused itself through the whole place.
“Smell it? You might think that was supper, but it ain't. It's breakfast. You got a bath and a night's rest as well as the quarter of a cord of wood between you and that stew. Hungry?”
“Not very,” said Lemuel faintly.
“Because if you say you are they'll give you all the bread and water you can hold, now. But I ruther wait.”
“I guess I don't want anything to-night,” said Lemuel, shrinking from the act of beggary.
“Well, I guess you won't lose anything in the long run,” said the other. “You'll make it up at breakfast.”
They turned into a room where eight or ten tramps were undressing; some of them were old men, quite sodden and stupefied with a life of vagrancy and privation; others were of a dull or cunning middle-age, two or three were as young as Lemuel and his partner, and looked as if they might be poor fellows who had found themselves in a strange city without money or work. But it was against them that they had known where to come for a night's shelter, Lemuel felt.
There were large iron hooks hanging from the walls and ceiling, and his friend found the numbers on two of them corresponding to those given Lemuel and himself, and brass checks which they hung around their necks.
“You got to hang your things on that hook, all but your shoes and stockings, and you got to hang on to them, yourself. Forty's your number, and forty's your hook, and they give you the clothes off'n it in the morning.”
He led the way through the corridor into a large room where a row of bath-tubs flanked the wall, half of them filled with bathers, who chatted in tones of subdued cheerfulness under the pleasant excitement of unlimited hot and cold water. As each new-comer appeared, a black boy, perched on a windowsill, jumped down and dashed his head from a large bottle which he carried.