midnight
They were all pale , flabby , sunken-eyed , hollow-chested , with eyes that glinted and shone and lips that were a sickly red by contrast . Their hair was but half attended to , their ears anæmic in hue , and their shoes broken in leather and run down at heel and toe . They were of the class which simply floats and drifts , every wave of people washing up one , as breakers do driftwood upon a stormy shore . For nearly a quarter of a century , in another section of the city , Fleischmann , the baker , had given a loaf of bread to any one who would come for it to the side door of his restaurant at the corner of Broadway and Tenth Street , at midnight . Every night during twenty years about three hundred men had formed in line and at the appointed time marched past the doorway , picked their loaf from a great box placed just outside , and vanished again into the night . From the beginning to the present time there had been little change in the character or number of these men . There were two or three figures that had grown familiar to those who had seen this little procession pass year after year .