Large quantities of provisions lay heaped in baskets and measures along the pavements in front of grocers’ shops, catching the soot and the floating dust of the open street. Cheap ready-made and second-hand garments hung flapping like scare-crows overhead, or clothed grotesque wooden dummies which stood chained to the shop doors or to the wood-work below the show-windows. Scores of idle men, with the unvarying leaden eye and soggy droop of their kind, loungingly exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with doorposts, chiefly of saloons. Little children in every stage of condition, from decent warmth to utter rags, and from wholesome cleanliness to dirt grown clean in unconsciousness of itself, played about the pavements and in the gutters, or ran screaming with delight across the street-car lines, along which the trams moved slowly, drawn by horses with bells tinkling from the harness. The first sight of my destination was very reassuring. It was evidently a shop of the first class. A second glance was disheartening, for already there were fully thirty men before me, and the number was increasing. From one of the men employed in the shop I learned that a man from the packing-house of the firm would be out to see us at the appointed hour. The appointed hour came and passed, and we waited on, our numbers grown now to nearly fifty. It was not far from two o’clock when the man appeared who had been commissioned to see us. There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a hireling who is puffed up with momentary authority but who knows nothing of responsibility. The man who finally came among us was a clerical subordinate, sleek, clean-shaven, overfed; a man of thirty, dressed as any like Johnnie of the town, and, except for his slender hold upon the means of livelihood, no better than most of the men who now hung breathless upon his words. He swaggered in among us with a leer and a call across the shop to a fellow-employee. “Say, Jim, how’s this for a collection of freaks, all out for a fifteen-dollar job?” Jim was silent; he did not see the joke any better than did we, who now crowded about the clerk. “Stand off,” he ordered us, with a gesture of impatience and an oath. “Don’t you fellows come so near. I guess most of you need water more than you need a job.” There followed some minutes of such banter, while the clerk looked us over and examined hastily some letters of recommendation which were held out to him. Then abruptly, with the air of a busy man chafing at the useless waste of his valuable time, he withdrew a step or two from the crowd, and from this coign of vantage he arbitrarily singled out four men. Having called them aside he ordered them to report at ten o’clock on the next morning at the packing-house, where a member of the firm would see them and select one of them for the place, which was that of general utility man about a private house, at a wage of board and lodging and fifteen dollars a month.