But after the first sense of arrest and confusion which came upon those within the scope of the sound, there arose the humane idea of rendering succour to the living, if the place contained anyone alive, or tendering services to the dead, supposing both had perished. Then it was anxiously asked, was anything known as to whether either or both men were in the tower. It was well known that the old man now seldom came forth, that the young man brought in the provisions necessary for the two, and that even he was seldom for any long time absent from St. Prisca's. Moment by moment people began to recollect that the old man had not been seen out of the tower for many days, and that the young man had been seen to leave the tower and return. In such a crowded thoroughfare it was almost impossible that the door of the tower could be opened without exciting observation. It was also nearly impossible that any close observation could have been made. It is quite common for a busy man who lives close to a church clock that strikes the hours and the quarters, to hear and yet not heed the striking of the clock; so that you may ask him, after the striking, what has occurred with regard to the hour, and he may have been perfectly unconscious at the time the clock struck that he was observing the sound, and yet when asked he may be able to tell perfectly the time. So it was with these busy folk in Porter Street. They had never regarded those two men with any interest whatever beyond the interest one feels for a friendly but unknown dog, or for a man who is not likely ever in the course of life to have more than a passing interest for the observer. Nevertheless, these busy folk who worked hour by hour, day by day, and the sum of whose life was made up in the sum of their work, and the mere material comforts and pleasures which the result of their work brought them, had insensibly drunk in the fact that two men had entered that tower, that neither of these men had come forth, and that now the likelihood was the lives of either or both of these men had been swallowed up in the catastrophe which had occurred. With men of the class who worked in Porter Street, thought is a very rarely exercised faculty. They have to carry huge weights, heave winches, stow goods, pack and manage vast bales, in the conduct of which the eye for space and the muscle for motion is all that is called into play. Everything else is designed by the foreman, and each man has no more to do with every separate piece of goods than dispose of it as his strength will allow in the position the foreman indicates.