At that hour the underworld of Rivington Street enough recovers from its drunkenness of the night preceding to stagger forth and drink again. The doors of the shouldering saloons swing open and bang shut in a running accompaniment, and the highway rocks with it until a cloud of clattering two-wheeled push-carts swoops from "The Push-Cart Garage" around the corner and alights as if it were a plague of pestilent flies. Bearded Jews propel these, Jews with shining derbies far back upon their heads, who work sometimes for themselves, but more often for the owners of the push-cart trust, who squabble for positions in the gutter where an impotent law forbids any of them long to remain, but where, once entrenched, they stand for hours, selling stockings at five cents and shirts at ten, mirrors and vegetables, suspenders and lithographs, shoestrings and picture-postcards, collars of linen and celluloid, all sorts of cheap dress-material, every description of brush, fruit, and cigar-butts. The carts are end-to-end now; one could walk upon them from cross-street to cross-street. Each has its separate gasoline torch leaping up, in flame and smoke, to the descending darkness. Upon them charge the returning army of workers. The crowd is all moving eastward; you could not make six yards of progress to the west; the sidewalks overflow, the street is filled. The silence of the morning has changed to a mad chorus of discords. The thousand weary feet shuffle, the venders shriek their wares; there is every imaginable sound of strife and traffic, but there is no distinguishable note of mirth. Wagons jostle pedestrians, graze children, are blocked, held up, turned away. The thoroughfare is like a boiling cauldron; it can hold no more, and still it must hold more and more. Only very slowly, as the night wears on, do the crowd and noise lessen; but at last, by tardy degrees, they do lessen. Imperceptibly, but inevitably, even this portion of New York breathes somewhat easier. By twos and threes the people melt away; a note at a time, the cries weaken and the shuffling dies; and finally, in the small hours of the morning, Rivington Street turns over, with a troubled sigh, to a restless doze. But to doze only. Its bad conscience will grant it no absolute oblivion, no perfect rest, however brief. Cats yell from the dizzy edges of the lower roofs; dogs howl from the doorsteps. Back in the narrow courts and alleys and passages, drunken battles are won and lost. The elevated cars roar out the minutes through the nocturnal distances. An ambulance clangs into a byway street. A patrol-wagon clatters past. Rivington Street turns and tosses on its hot couch, and through its dreams slink hideous shadows that dare not show themselves by day. One, ten, a hundred, each alone, they come and go: vague, inhuman. And then, reluctantly, the hesitant dawn creeps shivering out of the East River, and the weary day begins again.