But these men are a bit of dramatic color in the city’s life, whatever their sufferings. To see them following in droves through the bitter winter streets the great wagons which haul the snow away is fascinating, at times pitiful. I have seen old men with white beards and uncut snowy hair shoveling snow into a truck. I have seen lean, unfed strips of boys without overcoats and with long, lean, red hands protruding from undersized coat sleeves, doing the same thing. I have seen anæmic benchers and consumptives following along illy clad but shoveling weakly in the snow and cold. It is a sad mix-up at best, this business of living. Fortune deals so haphazardly at birth and at death that it is hard to criticize. It so indifferently smashes the dreams of kings and beggars, dealing the golden sequins to the sleeping man, taking from the earnest plodder the little which he has gained, that one becomes, at last, confused. It is easy for many to criticize, for one reason and another, and justly mayhap, but at the same time it is so easy to see how it all may have come about. Wit has not always been present, but sickness, a perverted moral point of view, an error in honesty, and the climbing of years is over; the struggling toad has fallen back into the well. There is now nothing but struggle and crumb-picking at the bottom. And these are they. And so these storms, like the bread-line, like the Bowery Lodging, offer them something; not much. A few days, and the snow will be over. A few days, and the sun of a warm day will end all opportunity for work. They will go back again into the gloomy adventuring whence they emerged. Only now they are visible collectively, here in the cold and the snow, shoveling. I like to think of them best and worst, though, as I have seen them time and time again waiting outside the wagon barns at night, the labor of the day over. It is something even to be a “down-and-out” and stand waiting for a pittance which one has really earned. You can see something of the satisfaction of this even in this gloomy line. In the early dark of a winter evening, the street’s lamps lighted, these men are shuffling their feet to keep warm. They are waiting to be paid, as they are at the end of each work day, but in their hearts is a faint response to the thought of gain--one dollar and seventy-five cents for the long day in the cold. The quarter is yielded gladly. The contractor finds a fat profit in the many quarters he can so easily garner. But these? To them it is a satisfaction to get the wherewithal to face another day. It is something to have the money wherewith to obtain a lodging and a meal for a night. That one-seventy-five--how really large it must look, like fifty or a hundred or a thousand to some. Satisfactions and joys are all so relative. But they have really earned one dollar and seventy-five cents and can hurry away to that marvelous table of satisfaction which one dollar and seventy-five cents will provide.