II.

My friend’s heart beat with glad anticipation.  He was really to see this important, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage.  He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnight loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way:  the next day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those who needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise.  She understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have liked very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic.  Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having fancied it.

He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would get out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving the bread.  Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask them about themselves.  At the time it did not strike him that it would be indecent.

A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture.  It was not probable that they were any of them there for their health, as the saying is.  They were all there because they were hungry, or else they were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry.  But it was always possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if any test was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving.  If one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did not so much matter.

It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they would tell him lies.  A fantastic association of their double files and those of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind.  He smiled, and then he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts —­slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty.  All at once he fancied them actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted to buy.  He thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it would ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been.  Would the world ever outlive it?  Would some New-Year’s day come when some President would proclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more?  That would be fine.

III.

He noticed how still the most of them were.  A few of them stepped a little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together.  They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no more need of defence from the cold than the dead have.

He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among them.  He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff, wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their deceit.