male and female, disappear one by one, the stores have closed their doors, until the only places which show signs of business activity are here and there a saloon or a tobacco store, which may or may not have a keg of lager on tap in the back-room or a “little game” upstairs. Now the streets again assume for a few minutes a lively aspect as the places of amusement are emptied of their audiences. Overladen street cars make their final trips, toiling wearily up the ascent with frequent stoppages as the suburbs are neared. And now the streets are almost deserted again. Stray pedestrians hurry or totter homeward. The saloon lights are extinguished, but acute ears can still hear the clink of glasses and the subdued conversation of groups of revellers who are bound to make a night of it, and are cheerfully fuddling themselves in a back room. The wearied bar-keeper will let them out by a side door in an hour or two. He will breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief as they stumble over the threshold, and slipping the bolt with alacrity, to prevent any other belated seeker after the ardent gaining entrance, he will knock down about half of the cash the party have left, and congratulate himself on his honesty in leaving so much for his employer. One o’clock. The city sleeps. The few stragglers on the streets only serve to make the general impression of silence and solitude the more vivid by contrast. Here and there is a pedestrian on his homeward way, or perhaps a party of two or three late roysterers laughing and bursting into snatches of song, but growing suddenly silent and bracing up as the measured tread of the blue-coated guardian of the night approaches. Now and then a stray hack rumbles by, the noise of the wheels gradually dying away in the distance and leaving no other sound audible. The night watchman passes, carefully trying the doors of the stores and halting for a friendly chat with the policeman on the corner of the block. The puffing of the locomotive or steamboat engine a mile or two away, inaudible during the day-time, sounds strangely near. Up and down the long stretches of sidewalk hardly anyone is in sight. It is like a city of the dead. The cold steely-blue brilliancy of the electric light makes the darkness around their radiant circle seem denser and throws the dark shadows of intervening objects across the street. The long rows of gas-lamps on the side streets “pale their ineffectual fires” and present but a sickly glimmer by contrast, and overhead shine the eternal stars, whose distant scintillations amid the silence and darkness of midnight have ever had power to speak from the soul of things to the soul of man, and suggest the ever-old yet ever-new problems of life and destiny unheard and unheeded amid the distractions of the day. CHAPTER I. THE TOILERS OF THE NIGHT.