The Minister's Charge eBook

light for a moment, and then vanished in the darkness she passed into.  It was that hot October, and the night was close and still; on the steps of some of the houses groups of fat, weary women were sitting, and children were playing on the sidewalks, using the lamp-posts for goal or tag.  The tramp ahead of Lemuel issued upon a brilliantly lighted little square, with a great many horse-cars coming and going in it; a church with stores on the ground floor, and fronting it on one side a row of handsome old stone houses with iron fences, and on another a great hotel, with a high-pillared portico, where men sat talking and smoking.

People were waiting on the sidewalk to take the cars; a druggist’s window threw its mellow lights into the street; from open cellar-ways came the sound of banjos and violins.  At one of these cellar doors his guide lingered so long that Lemuel thought he should have to find the way beyond for himself.  But the tramp suddenly commanded himself from the music, the light, and the smell of strong drink, which Lemuel caught a whiff of as he followed, and turning a corner led the way to the side of a lofty building in a dark street, where they met other like shapes tending toward it from different directions.

VIII.

Lemuel entered a lighted doorway from a bricked courtyard, and found himself with twenty or thirty houseless comrades in a large, square room, with benching against the wall for them to sit on.  They were all silent and quelled-looking, except a young fellow whom Lemuel sat down beside, and who, ascertaining that he was a new-comer, seemed disposed to do the honours of the place.  He was not daunted by the reserve native to Lemuel, or by that distrust of strangers which experience had so soon taught him.  He addressed him promptly as mate, and told him that the high, narrow, three-sided tabling in the middle of the room was where they would get their breakfast, if they lived.

“And I guess I shall live,” he said.  “I notice I ’most always live till breakfast-time, whatever else I do, or I don’t do; but sometimes it don’t seem as if I could saw my way through that quarter of a cord of wood.”  At a glance of inquiry which Lemuel could not forbear, he continued:  “What I mean by a quarter of a cord of wood is that they let you exercise that much free in the morning, before they give you your breakfast:  it’s the doctor’s orders.  This used to be a school-house, but it’s in better business now.  They got a kitchen under here, that beats the Parker House; you’ll smell it pretty soon.  No whacking on the knuckles here any more.  All serene, I tell you.  You’ll see.  I don’t know how I should got along without this institution, and I tell the manager so, every time I see him.  That’s him, hollering ‘Next,’ out of that room there.  It’s a name he gives all of us; he knows it’s a name we’ll answer to.  Don’t you forget it when it comes your turn.”