“If we ain’t never had ’em, I guess we’ll catch ’em to-night,” says Clark, softly in my ear, and the words take on a sickening significance as we enter an unventilated atmosphere of foulest pollution, and we see more clearly the frowzy, ragged garments of unclean men, and have glimpses here and there of caking filth upon a naked limb. The wisdom of a late hour of retiring is at once apparent when we have sight of the inner passage. Not a square foot of the dark, concrete floor is visible. The space is packed with men all lying on their right sides with their legs drawn up, and each man’s legs pressed close in behind those of the man in front. Clark draws from an inside pocket a roll of old newspapers, and hands me one. We spread them on the pavement as a Mohammedan unrolls his mat for prayers, and then we take off our boots and coats. Our soaked, pulpy boots we fold in our jackets and use them as pillows, and we soften our bed by spreading over the newspapers our outer coats, which thus have a chance to dry in the warmth of the room and in that which comes from our bodies. We need no covering in the steaming heat in which we lie, and I can see at a glance that Clark and I are more fortunate than most of the other men, for few of them have outer coats, and in their threadbare, filthy garments they lie with nothing but paper between them and the floor, their heads pillowed on their arms. By no means are all of them asleep. In the thick air above their reclining figures there is an unceasing murmur of low, gruff voices. What words can fit the hellish quality of that strange converse? It is not human, though it comes from living men; it has no humor though it touches life most intimately; it knows hot hate and craving need and blank indifference, but all these feelings speak alike a tongue of utter blasphemy; and it is not prurient even, though it reeks with coarse obscenity. And in the men themselves, how widely severed from all things human is the prevailing type!--Their bloated, unwashed flesh and unkempt hair; their hideous ugliness of face, unreclaimed by marks of inner strength and force, but revealing rather, in the relaxation of sleep, a deepening of the lines of weakness, until you read in plainest characters the paralysis of the will. And then there are the stealthy, restless eyes of those who are awake, eyes set in faces which lack utterly the strength of honest labor and even that of criminal wit. But there are marked exceptions to the prevailing type, men like Clark, sound and strong in flesh, and having about them the signs of habitual decency, and their faces stamped with the open frankness which comes of earning a living by honest work. Some of these are young immigrants, newly come, most evidently, and I picture their rude awakenings from golden dreams of a land of plenty. Clark is fast asleep beside me, but I cannot sleep for gnawing hunger and the dull pain of lying bruised and sore upon the hard, paved floor.