Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/466

452 climbed up the stairs and entered the room. The odors from a foul water-closet near the door made me recoil, but I closed the door behind me and, shambling across the floor, threw myself upon a bench. The room I was in was the office, waiting-, smoking-, and reading-room. It was now 2 A few men were still sitting about the room, some reading, many in a drunken stupor. I was becoming "acclimated." I let the office-man enter my name, letting him suppose that I could not write, and lead the way back to my "bed." In a large room dimly lighted by smoking kerosene lamps were 100 two-story iron bedsteads, placed end to end between the aisles; on the iron frame was a mere rag of a mattress and another for a covering, reeking with filth and alive with vermin. It was not inviting. Slowly and reluctantly undressing, I at last submitted my body to the company of my thousands of bed-fellows, using my wet coat for a pillow. The sounds, the sights, and the odors made that night one of indescribable horror. The close room, the steam rising from dirty garments, wet with the sweat and rain, the foul breath of a hundred men, the unbearable stench of the syphilitic, made the foul air fouler as the hours wore on. Nor was this all: the rumbling of the thunder without and of bowels within, the curses of men kept awake by the groans and occasional piercing cries of the wretched victims in the first clutches of the tremens, the hacking cough of the consumptive, entered into successful combination to keep Somnus from our gates. Men naked, some smoking clay pipes, walking about in the weird light (the man above me planted his foot squarely on my breast as he climbed down), caused me to wonder if I were still upon the earth in a civilized country, or if in my dreams I had descended into Dante's inferno. The feet of the man next us often touched our heads, no partition being between. "The manager," in answer to one man's complaint, simply took the rag of a mattress and pulled it up between the man's head and the feet of the offending sleeper. Such is the place where hundreds spend their nights.

Shall we wonder that they do not loaf and spend their evenings "at home"? Would any sane man for an instant