When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it was a few minutes before.  Except for their own coup, the cable-cars, with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs at the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves.  A tall, lumbering United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central Station.  He listened with half an ear to the child’s account of the fun she had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves.

He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the place where he had left them.  But the driver remembered, and checked his horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater number than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along the side street.  They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door where the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before they were all gone.

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.