The converging lines of workmen made denser the mass that pressed quickly through the gate. There was little speech among them, and the noise they made was the shuffling, broken step of an unorganized crowd. But there was not wanting the inspiration of a moving throng of men. Some of them were old and much bent with pain and labor, and there were boys in the crowd who could be but little beyond their first decade of life, but the great body of the hands were young men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. One could trace upon these faces all the stages of life’s handicraft, in distorting human countenances into grotesque variations from all normal types of beauty, and bringing out upon them, in infinite variety, individual expressions of aggressive power and the strength which comes of long endurance. Ah, the hideous ugliness of the race to which we belong, and yet the more than beauty of it in the strong lines it bears of honest work faithfully done and of pain and sorrow bravely borne! With the last sharp ringing of the bell there was a sudden rush of the living stream of workers, and then it abruptly ceased, and we, the unemployed, stood at both sides along the high board fence, like so much useless foam tossed off by the swift current which had poured through the narrow gate. The keeper began a monotonous march up and down the opening before his sentry-box. He was a muscular, blue-eyed Irishman of fifty-five or sixty, and he was in no wise ignorant of his business. There was nothing to indicate that he was aware of the presence of the crowd of expectant men, until some of us pressed too near to the gate in our anxiety to catch sight of a foreman in search of extra hands, and then he ordered us back with a violence which showed that we were one of the pests of his existence. From some unseen quarter of the factory yard a closely covered wagon suddenly appeared. The paymaster presently descended from the superintendent’s office, and entering the wagon, he was driven to the gate, where a halt was made while two loaded revolvers were handed to him by the porter, in full view of the idle men, and then he was driven rapidly up the avenue toward the city. It was the usual heterogeneous crowd that lingered there about the gate. Most of them were Irishmen, I think, and there were certainly Italians and Scandinavians and some Welshmen, and even a few Polish Jews, while Clark and I, so far as I could judge, were the only native born. Not all of them could have been in the homeless plight in which we were, and there was scarcely a case of insufficient clothing among them, while many seemed to be habitual workmen who knew the decencies of home and of some home comfort. But there were not wanting men who, like us, were evidently upon the streets, and not only in dress, but in face, they suggested those who, if not already of that class, are swiftly approximating to professional tramps.