Winter days in a great city bring some peculiar sights. If it snows, the streets are at once a slushy mess, and the transaction of business is, to a certain extent, a hardship. In its first flakes it is picturesque; the air is filled with flying feathers and the sky lowery with somber clouds. Later comes the slush and dirt, and not infrequently bitter cold. The city rings with the grind and squeak of cold-bitten vehicles, and men and women, the vast tide of humanity which fills its streets, hurry to and fro so as to be through with the work or need that keeps them out of doors. In certain sections of the city at a period like this may be found groups of men who are constituted by nature and conditions to be an integral part of every storm. They are like the gulls that follow the schools of fish at sea. Poverty is the bond which makes them kin and gives them, after a fashion, a class distinction. They are not only always poor in body, but poor in mind also, and as for earthly belongings, of course they have not any.
These men, like the gulls and their fish, pick a little something from the storm. They follow the fortunes of the contractors who make arrangements with the city for the removal of the snow, and about the wagon-barns where the implements of snow removal are kept, and where daily cards of employment are issued they may234 be seen waiting by hundreds, and not at such hours and under such conditions as are at all pleasant to contemplate, either. In the early hours of the morning, when the work of the day is first being doled out, they may be seen, cold, overcoatless, often with bare hands and necks, no collar, or, if so, only a rag of a thing, and hats too battered and timeworn to be honestly dignified by the name of hat at all.
The city usually pays at the rate of two dollars a day for what shoveling these men can do. They are not wanted even at that rate by the contractors, for stray, healthy laborers are usually preferred; but the pressure under which the contractors are put by the city and the public makes a showing necessary. So thousands are admitted to temporary labor who would not otherwise be considered, and these are they.
So in this cold, raw, strenuous weather they stand like so many sheep waiting at the entrance to a fold. There is no particular zeal in this effort which they are making to live. Hunger for life they have, but it is a rundown hunger, dispirited by lack of encouragement. They have been kicked and pushed about the world in an effort to live until, as a rule, they are comparatively heartbroken and courage-broken. This storm, which spells comfort and indoor seclusion and amusement for many, spells a rough opportunity for them—a gutter crust, to be sure, but a crust.
 
The Men in the Snow
And so they are here early in the morning, in the dark. They stand in a long file outside the contractors’ stable door, waiting for that consideration which his present need may show. A man at a little glass window235 cut in a door receives them. He is a hearty, material, practical soul who has very little to suggest in the way of mentality but much in the spirit of acquisitiveness. He is not interested in the condition of the individuals before him. It does not concern him that in most cases this is a last despairing grasp at a straw. Will this fellow work? Will he be satisfied to take $1.75 in place of the $2.00 which the city pays? He does not ask them that so clearly; it is done in another way.
“Got a shovel?”
“No, sir.&rdquo............