noon
This simple announcement was modest in the extreme , covering , as it did , a charity so broad . Institutions and charities are so large and so numerous in New York that such things as this are not often noticed by the more comfortably situated . But to one whose mind is upon the matter , they grow exceedingly under inspection . Unless one were looking up this matter in particular , he could have stood at Sixth Avenue and Fifteenth Street for days around the noon hour and never have noticed that out of the vast crowd that surged along that busy thoroughfare there turned out , every few seconds , some weather-beaten , heavy-footed specimen of humanity , gaunt in countenance and dilapidated in the matter of clothes . The fact is none the less true , however , and the colder the day the more apparent it became . Space and a lack of culinary room in the mission-house , compelled an arrangement which permitted of only twenty-five or thirty eating at one time , so that a line had to be formed outside and an orderly entrance effected . This caused a daily spectacle which , however , had become so common by repetition during a number of years that now nothing was thought of it .