CHAPTER I.

THE TOILERS OF THE NIGHT.

When the streets leading from the center of the city are full of people hurrying gleefully or otherwise homewards from their day’s toil, there is another small section of the community who are hurrying in the opposite direction. These men begin to work when all others have ceased. The morning newspaper employes, the telegraph operators, the bakers, the policemen, and the nightwatchmen are the most important divisions of these toilers of the night.

In connection with the different newspaper establishments in the city there are probably about 600 persons employed at night. These include compositors, pressmen, stereotypers, mailing clerks, editors, reporters, and route boys. All do not work during the same hours, but some portions of their various tasks are accomplished when “Night draws her sable mantle around and pins it with a star.” The compositors begin “setting” about 7 o’clock and cease about 3. This does not comprise the whole of their work, however, as the next day they spend two or three hours filling up the cases which they did their best to empty the night before. It is an exceedingly see-saw business—undoing in the day what they performed in the night. The work is entirely by the piece, and a fast hand makes a good wage to reward him for his toil, but this wage represents twelve or thirteen hours of labor in the large establishments. Many of the men think that it would be better to

RESTRICT THE HOURS OF TOIL

to ten, as they claim that bosses don’t look at the number of hours worked, but at the money earned. The hours of the literary staff of a morning paper are fitful and uncertain, but the general rule is that when you are awake you had better go to work. The stereotypers get to their cauldrons of boiling lead shortly after midnight, and the pressmen are at their post about 3.30—just when the typo is washing his hands and preparing to leave. The mailing clerks are the next to put in an appearance, and almost simultaneously the little route-boy slips through the door, prepared for his morning tramp.

About sixty-five policemen hold watch over the sleeping city by night. Their work varies in winter and summer. Just now they remain on beat eight hours at a stretch. In winter they are on three hours, off three hours, and on again for the same length of time. Their work and its incidents will form the topic of another of these sketches.

The next most important body of men, and probably more numerous, is the bakers. It is calculated that about 300 persons find employment in supplying our citizens with their bread. All of these, however, do not work at night. Their labor begins about three o’clock, and they may be seen about that hour in their floury garments hieing them to their shops. Their work is performed in very hot rooms, and is on the whole

LABORIOUS AND MONOTONOUS.

On their skill depends one of the greatest luxuries of the table—a well baked loaf of bread—and to their credit be it said, success very frequently crowns their efforts.

The telegraph operators who work at night do not average over a dozen men. This staff is lessened or increased very much in sympathy with the quantity of dispatches which are coming in to the morning papers. When any great event is transpiring in another land or another part of this country, and long messages are coming in concerning it, the staff has to be increased, and for this purpose men are drafted from the day staff. It is an unhealthy business. In most mortality-tables, the life of the operator shows the shortest average. Not long ago they struck for higher wages and made a plucky fight, but monopoly was too much for them. Ever since they have had the screws put on them pretty tightly. Reductions in the staff and reductions in the salaries have been the order of the day. In view of these facts some of them think that it is a good thing they don’t live too long.

These are briefly the main facts connected with the toilers of the night, men who work while the rest of the world are asleep—asleep feeling assured that the telegrapher is gathering in for them the news of the world, and that the newspaper men are printing it for them, that the baker is preparing for them the breakfast roll, and that the policeman is watching over their lives and their property, and keeping his weather eye on those other people of the night, whom we are pleased to designate the Hawks.