“These dives, you mean?” “Yes.” “They are all the same. There are hundreds like them in this town,” he answers. Near the centre of what appears to be the chief business section of the street Clark turns into a dark entry. “Come up here,” he says to me over his shoulder. “What is this?” I call after him from the threshold. “Here’s where I slept last night,” he replies. I follow up a flight of filthy wooden steps. Under the light of a single gas-jet which burns faintly over the first landing, we turn to a door at the right. Within is a sustained volume of men’s voices at conversation pitch, and we enter at once upon a company of thirty or forty men seated on wooden benches around a base-burner, or standing in groups within the compass of its grateful warmth. The unmoving air is thick with tobacco-smoke, and dense with pollution beyond all but the suggesting power of words. An electric arc gleams from the centre-ceiling, and sputters and hisses above the noise of mingled speech. In the ghastly light the floor and walls are covered with black shadows, sharply articulated, and revealing clearly through their restless movements the ragged, unkempt condition of the men. In one corner is an office quite like a ticket-booth at an athletic field, and behind the narrow window stands a man with an open book before him. His eyes wander ceaselessly over the company, and presently he steps out into the open room. He is making straight for Clark and me; his grease-stained, worn, black suit hanging loose about his wasted figure, a something not unlike a small decanter-stopper glistening on the bosom of his soiled, collarless, white shirt, his singularly repulsive face growing clearer as he comes, the receding forehead and small, weak, close-set piercing eyes, the high cheek-bones and bristling black mustache over a drooping mouth stained with tobacco. He walks straight up to Clark. “You was here last night?” he asks with rising inflection and a German accent. “Yes,” says Clark. “I come up to-night to see a fellow I know,” he adds of his own initiative. “Do you see him?” says the clerk. “No.” “Was you and your pal going to take beds?” “No.” And in the awkward situation thus created, Clark and I go out once more from the luxury of warmth and shelter. The pavements are now in possession of crowds returning from the theatres, and at certain crossings is a rush for cable-cars going south. We turn down Quincy Street. It is still almost an hour before midnight. Simultaneously we notice a deep, wide entry of a business house, so deep that its inner corners are quite dry, and one of them is fairly shielded from the wind. With a mutual impulse we turn in, and crouch close together on the paved floor in the shade of the sheltered corner.