A glimmer appears through the transom overhead, where some one is lighting the light. It sends a thrill of possibility through the watchers. On the old hats and peaked shoulders snow is piling. It gathers in little heaps and curves, and no one brushes it off. In the center of the crowd the warmth and steam melt it and water trickles off hat-rims and down noses, which the owners cannot reach to scratch. On the outer rim the piles remain unmelted. Those who cannot get in the center, lower their heads to the weather and bend their forms. At last the bars grate inside, and the crowd pricks up its ears. There is some one who calls: “Slow up there, now!” and then the door opens. It is push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then the crowd lessens. It melts inward, like logs floating, and disappears. There are wet hats and shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass pouring in between bleak walls. It is just six o’clock, and there is supper in every hurrying pedestrian’s face. “Do you sell anything to eat here?” one questions of the grizzled old carpet-slippers who opens the door. “No, nuthin but beds.” The waiting throng had been housed for the night. THE MEN IN THE SNOW Winter days in a great city bring some peculiar sights. If it snows, the streets are at once a slushy mess, and the transaction of business is, to a certain extent, a hardship. In its first flakes it is picturesque; the air is filled with flying feathers and the sky lowery with somber clouds. Later comes the slush and dirt, and not infrequently bitter cold. The city rings with the grind and squeak of cold-bitten vehicles, and men and women, the vast tide of humanity which fills its streets, hurry to and fro so as to be through with the work or need that keeps them out of doors. In certain sections of the city at a period like this may be found groups of men who are constituted by nature and conditions to be an integral part of every storm. They are like the gulls that follow the schools of fish at sea. Poverty is the bond which makes them kin and gives them, after a fashion, a class distinction. They are not only always poor in body, but poor in mind also, and as for earthly belongings, of course they have not any.