“Free shampoo,” explained Lemuel's mate. “Doctor's orders. Only you have to do the rubbing yourself. I don't suppose _you_ need it, but some the pardners here couldn't sleep without it,” he continued, as Lemuel shrank a little from the bottle, and then submitted. “It's a regular night-cap.” The tramps recognised the humour of the explanation by a laugh, intended to be respectful to the establishment in its control, which spread along their line, and the black boy grinned. “There ain't anything mean about the Wayfarer's Hotel,” said the mate, and they all laughed again, a little louder. Each man, having dried himself from his bath, was given a coarse linen night-gown; sometimes it was not quite whole, but it was always clean; and then he gathered up his shoes and stockings and went out. “Hold on a minute,” said the mate to Lemuel, when they left the bath-room. “You ought to see the kitchen,” and in his night-gown, with his shoes in his hand, he led Lemuel to the open door which that delicious smell of broth came from. A vast copper-topped boiler was bubbling within, and trying to get its lid off. The odour made Lemuel sick with hunger. “Refrigerator in the next room,” the mate lectured on. “Best beef-chucks in the market; fish for Fridays--we don't make any man go against his religion, in _this_ house; pots of butter as big as a cheese,--none of your oleomargarine,--the real thing, every time; potatoes and onions and carrots laying around on the floor; barrels of hard-tack; and bread, like sponge,--bounce you up if you was to jump on it,--baked by the women at the Chardon Street Home--oh, I tell you we do things in style here.” A man who sat reading a newspaper in the corner looked up sharply. “Hello, there! what's wanted?” “Just dropped in to wish you good night, Jimmy,” said Lemuel's mate. “You clear out!” said the man good-humouredly, as if to an old acquaintance, who must not be allowed to presume upon his familiarity. “All right, Jimmy,” said the boy. He set his left hand horizontally on its wrist at his left shoulder and cut the air with it in playful menace as the man dropped his eyes again to his paper. “They're all just so, in this house,” he explained to Lemuel. “No nonsense, but good-natured. _They're_ all right. They know me.” He mounted two flights of stairs in front of Lemuel to a corridor, where an attendant stood examining the numbers on the brass checks hung around tramps' necks as they came up with their shoes in their hands. He instructed them that the numbers corresponded to the cots they were to occupy, as well as the hooks where their clothes hung. Some of them seemed hardly able to master the facts. They looked wistfully, like cowed animals, into his face as he made the case clear. Two vast rooms, exquisitely clean, like the whole house, opened on the right and left of the corridor, and presented long phalanxes of cots, each furnished with two coarse blankets, a quilt, and a thin pillow.