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.

He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions, his reflections.  It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the fact.

To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue-black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal, after vain prayer.

Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind.  How early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole of bread?  As early as ten, as nine o’clock?  If so, did the fact argue habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure?  Did the slaves in the coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though they were closely neighbored night after night by their misery?  Perhaps they joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes.  Which of them were old-comers, and which novices?  Did they ever quarrel over questions of precedence?  Had they some comity, some etiquette, which a man forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back?  Could one say to his next-hand man, “Will you please keep my place?” and would this man say to an interloper, “Excuse me, this place is engaged”?  How was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the door where the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rear that the supply was exhausted?  This must sometimes happen, and what did they do then?